Documenting the Past and Publicizing Personal Stories: Sensescapes and the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange in Contemporary Turkey

Asli Igsız

Abstract

National identification practices and nationalist historiography in Turkey have long focused on erasing differences and diversity and configuring a “homogeneous” nation. More recently, an increasing personalization of geography through familial attributes and memories became an anchor for self-identification in contemporary Turkey, traceable through family history and personal narratives in the public domain. This shift in the way people engage with the past is symptomatic of nostalgia for a traceable self-identification through family histories pursued to geographies of “origin” as opposed to the “administered forgetting” of such identifications by nationalist ideologies. We can track this change over the last two decades in cultural products, such as documentary novels, memoirs, and family cookbooks, which have opened a space in the public domain to reconsider the past and to rewrite history at an individual level. The dynamics of this change are particularly evident in the case of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Compulsory Population Exchange and its representation in Kemal Yalçin’s documentary novel, The Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange (Emanet Çeyiz).

It was a book presented as a novel that arguably most effectively broke the 65-year Turkish silence surrounding the 1923 Greek-Turkish compulsory population exchange. In 1998, Kemal Yalçin published The Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange [Emanet Çeyiz] which tells the tale of the author, originally from Turkey, who goes to Greece to find his father’s Greek Orthodox neighbors and to return their daughter’s wedding trousseau. The trousseau was entrusted to Yalçin’s family when their Greek Orthodox neighbors were forced to leave Turkey in the 1920s and thought that they would soon return. The book—a collection of

oral accounts of the exchanged peoples from both Greece and Turkey whom the author met during his journey in his search for the owners of the trousseau—received immediate public attention and many awards in Turkey.1 But it raised questions regarding its genre: was this really a novel or a collection of oral history accounts? When I asked him why he chose to present this book as a novel, even though there was little fiction in it, Yalçin replied that, at that time, he did not think the Turkish public was “ready” for another genre to introduce this tragedy and that he reached a larger audience through presenting his story as a novel. This choice was strategic and his book is one of the earliest examples in Turkey of the now recurring genre, “documentary novel.”

A year later, in 1999, a group of second generation mübadil (exchanged people),2 originally from Greece and now established in Turkey, started a foundation in Istanbul for the people of the exchange, “Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfi” (literally, “Foundation for Lausanne Exchangees”) and began collecting oral history accounts. They built a website and established an email list that hosts more than 900 people, sponsored conferences and documentaries on the exchange, compiled recipes, archived photographs and other documents belonging to the mübadil, collaborated with their counterpart organizations in Greece, such as the members of the Association of People from Asia Minor of Rethymnon, and organized trips to their families’ homeland which many had never seen before with the slogan, “Greetings the soil of my birth!” (“Merhaba dog¨¨

dugum toprak!”).3 When interviewed, some of the founders identified the role of both the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey and Greece and The Entrusted Trousseau in raising an awareness of their family’s cultural background. Turkish state officials, on the other hand, first honored the novel with the Ministry of Culture’s 1998 Novel Success Prize. Then, in 2002, other state officials filed a complaint and prosecuted the book and author, citing the content of the book as “offensive” and an “insult” to Turkish national identity. The novel and its author have subsequently been acquitted.

As the fate of The Entrusted Trousseau indicates, history is a site of heated debates in Turkey, especially when the object of discussion is past ruptures4 such as the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory population exchange.5 Contemporary documentary genres play an important role in making past ruptures public and in articulating self-identification(s) by anchoring “identity” in the memory of a place. Cultural products, such as documentary films, novels, memoirs, and family cookbooks have opened a space in the public domain of Turkey over the past two decades, both to reconsider the past and rewrite history at an individual level.

Furthermore, by engaging with the past, this shift is symptomatic

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of nostalgia at two different levels: first, a publicly-constructed nostalgia for a pre-nation-state “multiculturalism” or diversity crystallized in public representations of different groups, including the Greek Orthodox community from Istanbul in the early 2000s, for example, which became emblematic of a selective nostalgia for Istanbul’s “past cosmopolitanism.”6 Additionally, the proliferation of individual histories traced to different personal maps—mediated through cultural products and other public circuits7—wove the diverse fabric of the past and present peoples of Asia Minor (Anatolia), the heartland of Turkey today, through personal and now-public histories. This shift might also be considered as making alternative histories public and thus bringing a plurality or polyphony (Ig¨

siz 2007:165)8 to the more straightforward nationalist official historiography that contains homogenizing tendencies of the past and present peoples in Turkey (e.g., representations of Greeks as enemies or all Muslims as Turks, etc.) as embodied in school textbooks and problematized by various scholars in the recent years (Çotuksöken, Erzan, and Silier 2003; Irzik and Tarba Ceylan 2005; Ersanli 2003; Göçek 2006:107; Millas 1991:21–33; Özbaran 1998:61–69; Stathis 1998:125–134).

Second, national identification practices and nationalist historiography were geared toward erasing differences and diversity to create one “homogeneous” nation of the Muslim millet (an Ottoman identification system) as “Turks” in the geography of nationalized territory (Aktar 2003:79–95; Bali 2001; Çag¨

lu 2004; Okutan 2004; Özdogan 2001; Özyürek 2007:1–15). But we see a reversal of this equation in some milieus in the 1990s: an increasing trend of personalization of geography through familial attributes and memories became an anchor for self-identification, rendered traceable through family history and personal narratives in the public domain. In other words, the longing for personal history is materialized in the form of recollecting family history and tracing these histories to maps of “origin.”9 One way this is manifested in the context of the mübadil relocated both in Greece and Turkey is what I call “sensescapes.”10

While some scholars correctly explain the growing interest in and nostalgia for the past through disillusionment with the present and future in Turkey (Neyzi 2002:137–158; Özyürek 2007:2), it is also true that the “postmodern demand” for particularism and asking the question, “who are we?” seem to have caught up in contemporary Turkey as well (Bryant 2004:5). Obviously, the question of juncture is also important in the more recent public interest in the population exchange: the 1999 earthquakes in the Aegean followed by a rapprochement between Greece and Turkey,

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the collaboration of the foreign ministers of the two countries, and increased questioning of competing nationalisms and state policies in Turkey, perhaps also triggered by Kurdish claims for self-identification, are all important factors.

As such, contemporary narratives of longing for the past and the lost homeland among the mübadil and their family members can be viewed as nostalgia11 for a traceable family history and a tool for identity work, eclipsing the uniform identification overwritten by state-sponsored narratives. Thus, at a personal level, familial references might be interpreted as an alghos (longing or grief) for the nostos (return home, also interpreted here as a return to the family “origins”) as exemplified by the slogan, “Greetings the soil of my birth!” that succinctly captures this dynamic. It is an attempt to return to family homeland soil, both literally and metaphorically through narratives of sensescapes, a geographically informed self-identification trope that conveys nostalgia for lost homelands and a sensory return to the place of “origin,” which is especially significant for the second and third generation mübadil as means to reconnect with family histories.

In this context, documenting the past through cultural products in general and documentary genres in particular emerges as a narrative strategy to address past ruptures in contemporary Turkey, such as the Greek-Turkish exchange of populations. While documentary novels such as the Entrusted Trousseau contribute to considering new ways of reconnecting with the past, both at a personal and public level, they also open a space for public articulations of plurality by putting individual experiences at their center. This initiative can be considered as a move away from the uniformity of nationalized identity narratives of official historiography exemplified in school textbooks, towards plurality in publicly expressed self-identifications. This move, however, as valuable as it is, is not unproblematic as individual accounts are increasingly presented as those of eye-witnesses, often equated with being straightforward “informants,” while at the same time eye-witness stature is configured as an authoritative position that can shed light on past events in contemporary Turkey’s public domain. This of course does not mean eye-witness accounts did not exist before, but rather, because of the present moment they gain a relatively new meaning as documents of the past.12

History and literature: contested sites of memory and identification

“History’s greatest trek. . . .” writes Melville Chater in the November 1925 issue of the National Geographic, “Tragedy stalks through the Near East as Greece and Turkey exchange two million of their people” (1925:533).13

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This “tragedy,” as Chater states, was a forced migration of religiouslyidentified groups—Muslims and Greek-Orthodox Christians—implemented in the form of an exchange of these peoples between two nation states.

Following the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish War in Asia Minor, the Lausanne Convention was signed in January 1923. Article One in the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations and Protocol states:

As from the 1st May, 1923, there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory. These persons shall not return to live in Turkey or Greece respectively without the authorisation of the Turkish Government or of the Greek Government respectively.14

Excluded from the exchange were about 200,000 Greek Orthodox in Istanbul since Greek Christians who arrived in Istanbul after 30 October 1918 were not considered inhabitants of the city and, therefore, would not be subject to the exchange. Likewise, a number of Muslims living in Western Thrace, close to the Turkish border in Greece, were also excluded from this forced migration.

The Lausanne Convention that specified the conditions of the exchange “set a precedent in international politics,” anthropologist Renée Hirschon argues, and it is “used as a reference point in discussions about subsequent mass population displacements in many parts of the world” (2003:xiv). And yet, despite its early characterizations as “history’s greatest trek” and as a colossal “tragedy,” and its later impact on discussions of mass displacements in international politics, such as the partition of India and Pakistan and their exchange of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, the Greco-Turkish population exchange was surprisingly absent in the official memory in Turkey and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in Greece where, articulated as the Asia Minor Catastrophe, it is recollected much earlier, not only through cultural products, but also archives such as those of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies. For decades these publicly recollected stories were those of the arriving Orthodox communities rather than of the departing Muslims (Papailias 2005:1–138, 2001:267–298; Doulis 1977).15 In this sense, the record of the Muslims who left Greece—before, during, or after the exchange—in public repertoires through books or films is also a relatively more recent phenomenon in Greece.

“Forgotten” for decades, the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory religious minority exchange has only recently started receiving wider attention, not only in international arenas other than Greece, but

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also in Turkey. Whereas the international lack of interest in the event, despite international involvement in the ratification and execution of the exchange and its impacts on global politics, raises questions about what happens to such ruptures in non-postcolonial settings in international public domains and how they are treated.16 The dynamics in Turkey are rather different as Turkish nationalist history has ignored questions of discrimination against arriving communities; the exchanged Muslims were expected to melt into the Turkish national identification pot, constructed and consolidated with official history.

In this context, new initiatives geared towards Turkification were taken in different arenas in the 1920s. For example, in the case of language, in 1928 a new campaign was launched promoting the use of Turkish in public spaces: “Citizen, speak Turkish!” This campaign targeted people whose mother tongue was not Turkish, and different groups such as Jews, Armenians, and Greek Orthodox, but also Cretan Muslims who came as part of the population exchange and did not necessarily speak Turkish. Constraints were implemented on the use of other languages in public spaces such as restaurants, trams, and theaters. Rifat Bali points out that some Turkish municipalities, such as Balikesir and Bergama (Pergamon), fined those who did not speak Turkish in public during the late 1920s (2001:134–135). Both Bergama and Balikesir were places of resettlement for large groups of the mübadil arriving from Greece. In fact, Balikesir took in 33,132 refugees, approximately 15% of the total coming to Turkey (Ari 1995:113).17

According to Bali, the campaign calling for speaking Turkish was at first met with negative reactions from different communities. Some would sit under signs reading, “Citizen, speak Turkish!” and speak their own language or simply tear down the signs (2001:136–137). It is also around this period that Turkish Criminal Code article 159 was enacted, according to which “Türklüg¨

ü tahkir” (“insulting Turkishness”) was made a crime (Bali 2001:136–137). This law seems to have been intended to protect state-sponsored Turkishness embedded in national self-esteem discourses to promote “national dignity” in such fields as history and national literature.18 In other words, anything that would challenge national pride (defined as Turkish and considered vital to the nationbuilding process) was not allowed in the public domain. For instance, Bali gives the example of two film importers, Avram and Mateo, who, in 1929, were prosecuted for insulting Turkishness because a foreign film they imported featured a dog named “Turk” (2001:137). As in the case of the author of The Trousseau, the defendants were acquitted, but their film was confiscated.

Considering how these dynamics of nationalist discourses marked

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the first decades of the Republic of Turkey, it should come as no surprise that Kemal Yalçin’s documentary novel was also labeled as offensive and prosecuted as an insult to Turkishness.19 Articulating dissidence with nationalist history, as well as promoting self-identifications other than the homogeneously conceptualized national identity, was also discouraged, both privately in the daily lives of many mübadil (as Yalçin also points out in his book) and publicly in the limited possibilities for making their stories known through such media as books or films. This, however, is a large problem, not only as a civil rights issue but also because what constitutes Turkishness and insults against it, are vastly blurred and problematic issues.

As for the “Citizen, speak Turkish!” campaign in the early years of the Republic, it did not last very long, although it was relaunched numerous times afterwards (Yildiz 2001:286–288; Aktar 2000:130–131). The key significance of the penal code and the Turkish-speaking campaign is the way both manifest official conceptualization of public space, crystallizing control over the public domain and activities therein.

What then was the role attributed to literature, or national literature in those years? According to his protégée, Afet Inan, Atatürk described literature as “Söz ve manayi, yani insan dimag¨

inda yer eden, her türlü bilgileri ve insan karakterinin en büyük duygularini, bunlari dinliyenleri veya okuyanlari, çok alakali kilacak surette söylemek ve yazmak sanati” (“[t]he art of telling and writing the word and meaning, that is the highest feelings of human character and all sorts of knowledge stored in human mind, in a meaningfully compelling way for the audience or readers”) (Inan 1959:272). Atatürk thus configured literature as rhetoric.20 As with history, he attributed to it a mission: literature was seen as a fundamental tool for education (“en esasli terbiye vasitalarindan biri”), a pedagogical organization (“tes*

ekkül”) guarding and protecting the conditions and future of human communities (Inan 1959:273). The human community is the Turkish nation in this context and literature is its guardian.

Furthermore, according to Inan, Atatürk maintained how “even a respectable and idealist profession like the military, engaging science and technology of life and encountering blood” finds the tool it needs in literature (1959:273). For the military, Atatürk contends, literature is an instrument to awaken individuals, to aim at specific targets, and to execute them, thus creating self-sacrificing and heroic individuals (Inan 1959:273). And in this process, literature helps military officers communicate their human conditions (hal) to the social community of which they are a part, preparing society for the great journey of humanity and heroism (Inan 1959:273). If configured properly, Atatürk postulated, literature education will prepare the Turkish child to express himself or

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herself naturally, and in a charismatic way that will engage the masses. In turn, the public will follow the Turkish child in achieving the great Turkish ideal (Inan 1959:273). Atatürk’s statements point to a strong interpretation of national literature as a pedagogical rhetorical tool and its role in education, therefore, as essential in shaping the minds of the Turkish populace.

The early 1990s, however, brought dramatic changes in the public domain; perhaps more than ever, the past was publicly questioned in Turkey and earlier state policies and ruptures were increasingly probed. In this light, the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange has arguably been one of the most revisited ruptures in the history of the Turkish Republic (Ig¨

siz 2007:184–187). Perhaps it was easier to start negotiating the past through this event because of the perceived symmetry between the Greek and Turkish states that mutually agreed upon this exchange.21

Nevertheless, the process has not been an easy one. In fact, the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange, sociologist Çag¨

lar Keyder argues, had serious “implications for the nationalist ideology that became the official historiography of the [Turkish] nation-state” (2003:51). As the last step in the international arena toward homogenizing the Turkish nation,22 the exchange was “excised from national history. This national history became, and until recently continued to be, the unchallengeable foundation of Turkish identity. The republican founders of the state opted for a blatantly constructed artefact with no reference to lived history, which later emerged as the ‘true story’ of the land and its population” (Keyder 2003:51). Thus, the absence of “the lived experience of the existing population or [of] the abundant physical evidence of a prior ‘non-homogeneous’ population” in the “official version of national history and identity” manifests a conscious effort to create a coherent narrative of the past and a homogeneous Turkish nation (Keyder 2003:51; Aktar 2000).

Similarly, historian Esra Danaciog¨

lu asks: “How permitting is our history tradition in understanding the history that circles the town where we live, our ordinary lives, houses, work spaces, or local history; how able are we to comprehend history as a ‘continuous game’ where we are also actors, rather than ‘a movie we watch?’ How much does our grasp of history allow us to look for answers on how different groups can co-exist and share the same geography?” (2001:11). She considers these questions difficult to answer, given the fact that “historiography in Turkey is state-sponsored or institutionally centralized, a field void of human experiences [insansizlas**and even in most cases seen

tirilmis],23 as a whole of national theses” (Keyder 2003:51; Danaciog¨

lu 2001:11–12; Özbaran 1992). At the same time, Danaciog¨

lu points out how in Turk

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ish history “motherland” is sacred and how “local [interpretations of] identities are perceived as bringing heterogeneous counter-dynamics to the homogeneously defined territory;” in other words, as a possible threat to homogeneity (2001:12). As such, different self-identifications had little public space for overt articulation (with the exception of non- Muslims) until very recently. In addition, the “administered forgetting” that marked the first decades of the Republic, with a series of changes that divorced peoples in Turkey from their past, such as those to the calendar and the alphabet were upsetting. Moreover, heterogeneity and diversity were not encouraged.

Consistent with other scholars who explore historiography and the relationship between history and memory, Danaciog¨

lu also advocates a change in this tradition and calls for owning history at an individual level and “repersonifying” (read including human experiences, putting a face on experiences) the field. In addition, her book is also a guide for conducting oral and local history with appendices of model oral history projects and sample interview questions.24 Around the same time, many scholars called for a reconsideration of history and the adoption of methodologies such as oral history in contemporary Turkey, changes that have also been affecting other fields such as that of cultural production.25 This does not mean it was done academically in cultural products as in scholarly history projects, but a panorama of the public domain shows how individuals’ relationships to history have been going through changes in contemporary Turkey. In other words, the past and identification of the self and others, in public arenas that were previously nationalized in the configurations of official history, have been going through a process of reconsideration and reconfiguration.

In this sense, documentary films and non-fiction books, such as The Entrusted Trousseau, have been instrumental in breaking away from these dynamics and bringing plurality and polyphony to the public domain. The story of The Entrusted Trousseau is a powerful example of the critical role played by cultural products in this process; it contributed to the weakening of simplistic representations of “Rum (Greeks) as enemies” (as implied in school textbooks), bringing human stories of the experiences of the population exchange to popular attention. Therefore, The Trousseau contributes to polyphony at different levels; by countering the official versions of history in Turkey as a field void of personal experiences, the book plays a role in the process of individualizing history, making individual stories public, and putting faces on and giving names to the characters in these stories. Moreover, individualizing history by making individual stories public in the body of a book de facto pluralizes the experiences of the exchange. The exchange itself is not a monolithically

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experienced historical event, but contains multiple meanings for different individuals.

In contemporary Turkey, documentary genres emerge not necessarily through their form or content, but through their function in relation to bringing individual stories to the public domain and personalizing or even personifying history, thus contributing to rewriting the individual into the repertories of public memory. More often than not, modern literary genres are identified through their thematic content, such as romances or thrillers, or through their form, such as poetry, and their function receives relatively less attention. Literary critic David Duff describes the question of generic function through what genres perform at different times and the changing meaning attributed to them as a result (2000:7–8). For example, referring to the earlier work of Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, Duff exemplifies the function of genres by examining the Russian ode that performed different functions in the eighteenth century and during the Romantic period (2000:7).

Similarly, “documents” are traditionally considered as historical materials preserved in institutionalized archives that bring objectivity and provide unquestionable proofs for historical narratives. The scientific models for history are informed by discourses of “objectivity,” “truth,” and “documentation.”26 These views have lately been subject to debates “in contesting scientific models of understanding [history] in Europe” and “in dissolving superficial views of historical ‘objectivity’” (Bentley 1999:21). And yet, in comtemporary Turkey, documents and documentation through cultural products have become a means to authenticate a narrative told not only by historians, but also by other individuals who publicize personal histories. But what does this mean exactly?

The documentation of truth and objectivity is largely a methodological and rhetorical legacy of the German historian Leopold von Ranke. A significant figure of the nineteenth century, Ranke had a deep impact on practices of writing history, especially in the world of English-language historiography (Warren 2003:24). As a historian of the generation that professionalized history, Ranke advocated the practice of archival research. Although he was not the first to suggest this, he is one of the main proponents of a “three-step” historiography methodology: the use of primary sources in the archives, a critical interpretation of these sources, and then the narrativization of these accounts (Lambert 2003:45). The “tenets of Rankeanism” are the “reality of objectivity, the possibility of meaningful interpretation of documentary evidence in an equally meaningful attempt to understand the past on its own terms, a rejection of the distortion of that evidence with personal and present needs in mind” (Warren 2003:25).27 While contemporary scholarship has

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dismantled the “documents as objective speakers of truth” and pointed out the problems with such approaches to the past, in contemporary Turkey, documenting the past through personal narratives and personal objects (such as photographs or recipes and memory) gained a new function— once more assuming a pedagogical role as in the early years of the Republic, but this time not necessarily dictated from above, literary and cultural products render the past legible through an individualized history. Documentary genres bring a new personalized historical literacy to self-identification, often expressed through nostalgic undertones in the context of the Greek-Turkish population exchange.

Of course, documentary genres are not specific to the population exchange case. It would also be simplistic to argue that documenting the past through cultural products is only resorted to by those who reconsider official historiography in one way or another. In fact, in the wake of a growing tide of neo-nationalism in 2004–2005, documentary genres are also resorted to by those who make nationalist or essentialist claims to provide the “real truth” of Turkey’s national past. Thus, documentary function is also not a set category, but a dynamic tool for engaging with the past and for understanding the socio-political implications of literary and cultural products used by individuals from all points along the ideological spectrum.

One of the reasons why such narratives gain a documentary value as proofs of “identity” is perhaps because of the rupture created in the early years of the Republic by what Esra Özyürek called “administered forgetting” of personal reference points in giving meaning to one’s self and surroundings (2007:3–6). These included changing the calendar, the alphabet, clothing, and systems of weights and measures, but also literature as engineered by the nationalization project (Özyürek 2007:3–6). In other words, personal narrations of the past and the public interest in family histories might be identified as symptomatic of nostalgia for a new ability to “read” in order to gain some literacy in personal history construed as a marker of “identity” rendered illegible by the nationalization project in the first decades of the modern Turkish nation-state.

This relatively new emphasis on the individual marks a shift in understanding subjectivity and agency—the authority to claim one’s selfidentification and to tell one’s stories in public. This in turn created an inevitable dynamic in which individual stories have become “eye-witness” accounts, gaining a documentary value while simultaneously setting up the individual as “informant” who will unveil past obscured events.

In this context, the recently deployed “documenting” as a narrative strategy both speaks to and is fed by a shift in subjectivities where individual narratives gain crucial significance as the stories of eye-witnesses. In

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general, the position of eye-witness extends to that of “informants” who are regarded as those who will unveil an unspoken past or a less known event in the public domain. Thus, eye-witness stature brings a new kind of agency—the authority to tell stories in public—while oral accounts and testimonies seem to be predominantly configured as authentic documents shedding light on the past. It is interesting to note that the Rankean approach to history, prevalent in public discussions on history in contemporary Turkey, has become a discourse of its own, embedded in conceptualizations of “truth” and “objectivity,”especially when the subject matter is past ruptures. Documentation as a means to construct the “truth” also finds an expression in the ways in which documentary genres are presented to their audiences, especially the ways in which they stage the authenticity of the stories they embody. Even though methodologically they are different, cultural products increasingly adopt this discourse and function as documents, at times as nostalgic ones, that can shed light on the details of past events that were hitherto unspoken or less visible in the public domain.

A documentary novel: the tale of a trousseau

Yalçin’s Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange was first published in 1998 by Belge, and after the public showed a keen interest, was reissued by a big corporate publisher, Dog¨

an Kitap.28 Both editions met the public with the same quotation on the back cover calling for diversity or multiculturalism. Taken from Yalçin’s recorded interview with Baba Yorgo from Ayancik, Sinop, now relocated in Greece, it reads: “Look at the beauty of this garden. Look at this peach, this plum, these flowers! . . . They are beautiful [because they are] all together. . . . The more [varieties of] religion, language, race within a country, the richer it is. . . . These are my last words to you, to those from Ayancik, from Sinop, and to Turks: There cannot be a garden with only one [type of] fruit! . . .” By likening Rum and Muslim communities to plants in a garden, this statement promotes diversity, as a critique of the homogenization policy behind the population exchange, which also applies to other ruptures such as the 6–7 September Events (the anti-Greek riots in Istanbul in 1955) (Alexandris 1983:256–266; Güven 2005).29 The book itself is a collection of oral accounts of the stories of mübadil from both Greece and Turkey.

The book’s “protagonist” is a wedding trousseau entrusted to author Kemal Yalçin’s family, when his fathers’ neighbors, the Minog¨

lu family left as part of the population exchange. Since the neighbors did not want the trousseau to be harmed in their travel to Greece, they request

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Yalçin’s grandfather to keep it for them. His grandfather treasures the trousseau and does not allow anyone to touch it, and as such, the trousseau has passed on to Yalçin’s father, and his mother kept it in her coffer until 1994. Following his father’s request for him to find the owners of the trousseau, the Minog¨

lu family and their younger daughter Sofiya, Kemal Yalçin leaves for Greece.

The first trip produces no result, as Yalçin cannot locate Sofiya to return her wedding trousseau, but in his travels in Greece he meets many Asia Minor Greeks who tell him their own stories of the exchange. Touched by these stories, Yalçin goes to Turkey, only this time to visit the villages of Greek Orthodox from Anatolia and to find their houses and homesteads. In these locations, he encounters the Muslims who arrived from Greece during the population exchange who are now settled in the villages of the Asia Minor Greeks whom Yalçin met during his first trip to Greece. The book ends with Yalçin going back to Greece where he finds Sofiya’s daughter and returns the trousseau to her because Sofiya has died.

The book is therefore divided into three parts: Yalçin’s first trip to Greece in an attempt to find the owners of the trousseau and his encounters with the Rum who left Turkey during the exchange and during subsequent political upheavals. The second part takes place in Turkey, when Yalçin travels to different regions in Anatolia in an attempt to find the houses or towns of those Rum he met in Greece during his first trip. Here, he interviews many mübadil who came from Greece to Turkey during the exchange. In the third part Yalçin returns to Greece and this time finds the daughter of Sofiya, the original owner of the trousseau, and he returns the trousseau to Sofiya’s daughter. The book therefore operates among different chronotopes: the chronos is the 1990s when Yalçin encountered different people who departed from Greece and Turkey, but it is also the chronos of the memories of exchanged peoples, during the war and during and after the exchange. The topos is a diversity of towns and villages in both Greece and Turkey.

In addition to the documenting narrative strategy observable through the presentation of photographs, the book’s layout as individual accounts of mübadil from both Greece and Turkey speaks to the eye-witness positioning of individuals as they narrate their experiences and memories of the lost homesteads and homelands. The configuration of the book, therefore, is a documentary one, as it is subdivided into individual narratives recorded and transcribed by Yalçin himself. In this sense, individuals express their past and self identification, and the discourse of unraveling a less known past event, a rupture, through individual narratives is also highlighted.

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Individual narratives in The Trousseau not only present the atrocities, violence, and hardships people encountered in their homeland before they left, but also the discrimination and difficulty in adapting to their newly arrived locales. In other words, narratives of rupture and upheaval are abundant in Yalçin’s book. This might be one of the reasons why in these accounts, nostalgia for a lost homeland becomes a yearning for a lost self-identification, at times brutally called into question by the locals of the recipient country: What makes people different from each other that creates those gaps that become abysses? How do we define what is called “ethnicity?” The exchanged people did not necessarily speak what is called today “ethnic” languages for not all Greek Orthodox spoke Greek, and not all Muslims from Greece spoke Turkish. This often resulted in their being called names (“Turkish seed” or “Greek seed,” in both cases an insult) or being alienated by the residents of the recipient country. Their religious affiliation did not always seem to be enough for the recipient country’s people to “accept” the newcomers. For a long time there were no inter-group marriages especially in smaller towns and villages, and the exchanged people were singled out, especially in more rural areas.30 These dynamics attest not only to how the mübadil might have suppressed their differences and felt compelled to adopt the homogenizing cloak of national identity, but also why their lost homelands might be recalled through nostalgia.

For instance, a Muslim mübadil, Refet Özkan, narrates his story: “We did not speak Turkish, our mother tongue was the Rum language. . . . In daily life, in the field, in the garden the natives would humiliate us and call us: ‘children of the infidel [non-Muslim]!’” (Yalçin 1999:263). Özkan continues with an incident when his teacher spat in his face when he realized that he did not speak Turkish (later, Özkan became a Turkish teacher, perhaps as a reaction to such pressures?).31 Another mübadil, Murtaza Acar, similarly narrates how the “natives,” the locals in the recipient country, disapproved of the mübadil speaking Greek: “The locals complained that we spoke Greek. They said: ‘What difference does it make. . . . Those who left spoke Greek, those who arrived instead equally speak Greek!’” (1999:188). Other Muslim mübadil, Salih Tilki and Saliha Korucu, relate similar incidents after they came to Turkey, how people (the “natives”) would call them “creatures” and spread rumors that the exchanged people devour humans (1999:208–212, 238).

According to interviews conducted by Yalçin, Greek Orthodox mübadil from Asia Minor were met with similar reactions from the “natives.” Angela Katrini says: “We spoke Turkish. Turkish was our native language. They [the local people] would say ‘Turks arrived! These are Turks! The immigrants will take our fields! They should leave!’ And they would

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send their dogs on us [for them to attack us]” (1999:143). Another account from Kayserili Karabas* reads: “Because we did not speak the Rum language they would say we were Turks, and they did not give us any woman to marry, nor would they take any woman from us [for the same purpose]” (1999:81).

In these accounts, it is possible to observe the significance of language in the daily interactions between the exchanged peoples and the “natives.” It is interesting to observe how in these narratives the newcomers and the locals identified each other according to their place of origin: Turks, “Turkosporoi” (“Turkish seed”), “gavur” (“infidel”), Greek seed, or “natives” (“yerli”). Religious attributes, initially envisioned as sufficient to homogenize the nation-state by the Greek and Turkish state officials, were not necessarily experienced as such by the people themselves, either by the exchanged people or the “natives.” As such, the rupture of identification and homeland marks the mübadil accounts in The Trousseau. These narratives of homeland and self-identification through geographic origin are significant in terms of revealing feelings of belonging traced through personal narratives colored with nostalgia and anchored in geographies of “origin,” and at the same time complicating “ethnic” attributes.

One such nostalgic trope of self-identification is sensescapes, memories of the departed land. Sensescapes bridge individual memory with the departed lands as mnemonics of the homeland and when incorporated into the documentary genre, and thus made public, they contribute to configuring the exchange as a painful experience as stories revealing the deep attachment to the lost homeland. In other words, they turn a personal or “private” nostalgia into a public one, weaving individual sensescapes into the fabric of diversity in the public domain as mediated by cultural products. One such example is the memory of “Uncle Yanni,” a Rum from Nevs*

ehir does not exist here! The taste of grapes was different there. . . . When the doors were [finally] opened for us to go back in 1974, I went back to Nevs*

ehir. . . . I found our house. . . . [Our old acquaintances were very nice, they asked me what I wanted, and I asked for grapes and pears.] They brought one tray of each. I ate and ate. . . . There is no such pear here! (Yalçin 1999:20)

The homeland is valued and remembered through the taste of the fruits grown in its soil. The rupture of the exchange surfaces at yet another level in these nostalgic narratives depicting the attachment to the lost

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homeland and its soil. In other words, the mübadil renders his or her lack of compatibility legible through his or her longing for the taste of fruits in his homeland.

Another such example is the story of Elefteria Staboulidis who narrates the tale of her father, a Greek Orthodox from Anatolia. When the Turkish government started issuing visas to the exchanged people to visit Turkey in 1974, her father tells her he is too old to go back and asks her to go to Turkey for him and to bring him soil from the garden of his family’s old house and water from their fountain.

My father said: “My daughter, I am old. . . . I cannot go to Kayseri. You go. Here is our address. These are the names of our neighbors. Find our house, our (home)land [yurt in Turkish]. Bring me a bag of soil from our garden; and, if it is still there, a bottle of water from our fountain. So; if I die, that will be after I drink the water of our fountain and after I kiss our soil.” I did what my father asked me to do. I went to Kayseri. I sought and found our house. There were other people living in there but the house was in a total state of ruin! I couldn’t get in! I sat in the garden. . . . I listened and listened to the soil. The fountain was still there, in front of the house. . . . I listened and listened to the sound of the water. Then, I took a bag of soil and a bottle of water from the garden. I brought them to my father. He put the soil inside of his pillowcase. His head on that pillow, he slept like that until he died. He drank the water drop by drop. . . . Elefteria lit a cigarette: “We were [also] the people of that [the same] soil. Why did we become enemies?” (Yalçin 1999:38–39)

This emotional passage of drinking the water and touching the soil of the lost land which was once home conveys a pain of departure and a nostalgic sensory return to the lost home through its essential elements of earth and water. Another significance of this passage is its representation of geography: Staboulidis’s account highlights the common existence of Greek Orthodox and Muslims, construed today as Greeks and Turks, in the same geography. She suggests that both peoples belonged to the same land; they were people of the same soil. The enmity she refers to between the peoples is not only a reference to the war years, but it is also reminiscent of the official narratives in Greece and Turkey that represented (and often still represent) each other as enemies. In this sense, a particular identification in Staboulidis’s account crystallizes, not necessarily a national one, but one that is informed by belonging to a same soil, a geographic identification rendered through familial affiliation to a geography of place.

Examples of sensescapes are abundant throughout the book—how sweet the grapes of the lost land were, as in Cretan Muslim Ismet Altayli’s accounts (Yalçin 1999:271), and how food tasted different in the departed

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lands, not only because of different ways of preparation but because of the way vegetables and fruits tasted. Visions of the departed land, the smell and taste of the water and agricultural products, but also music, songs from the lost land, are part of these nostalgic sensescapes that communicate a yearning for the lost homeland and a sensory return to this place. Rum mübadil Yorganis Orfanidis sings songs from Anatolia when he speaks of his homeland throughout his interview with Yalçin (1999:40–57), as does Angela Katrini (1999:149–150). Similarly, another Greek Orthodox from Anatolia, Hristo Kiryakidis says:

I will not speak—I will sing! . . . I used to know many songs [from Anatolia]. Opposite from our house lived the neighbor’s daughter. We would sing together. . . . I forgot most of what I remembered. I will sing [now], listen to the ballads and songs [that I still can remember]. (Yalçin 1999:296)

Likewise, Murtaza Acar, a Muslim mübadil from Grevena in Greece sings songs in Greek about Samos, the island of his girlfriend before he left Greece (Yalçin 1999:191–192).

Another recurrent theme in Yalçin’s collected narratives of the mübadil is the significance of geographic origin and geographicallyinformed identification. In fact, in addition to the geographic attributes such as “natives” or “Greek seed” or “Turkish seed,” sensescapes are just another example of this. These categorizations represent a geographicallyinformed identification: it was the place of origin that denominated who was who. For example, the late Ismet Altay, a Cretan Muslim woman who was relocated to Cunda, Ayvalik, mentions how “there were no natives” in Ayvalik when she and her family arrived (Yalçin 1999:273). She tells Yalçin how embarrassed she is because of the neglected state of the Greek Orthodox church in Cunda, how much she wished she could go back to Crete, and asks for peace in the Aegean (1999:270–276).

The book also makes a break with official narratives, especially with Yalçin’s decision to include his encounter with a Rum from Istanbul in Athens, Hristo Samog¨

lu, who did not leave Turkey as part of the population exchange in 1923 because the Rum of Istanbul were not part of the exchange agreement, but migrated much later, in 1968.

Following the events of 6–7 September 1955 in Istanbul, the mass looting of the remaining Greek Orthodox properties, and violence against them, Hristo Samog¨

lu’s family, concerned for their peace and safety, moved to Greece. Samog¨

lu followed them after he finished high-school in 1968. Yalçin describes Samog¨

lu’s welcoming of himself as a fellow countryman (1999:21). He owns a shop in Athens and when Kemal Yalçin was there spoke to him in Turkish except when he had customers. He tells Yalçin “As you see, I don’t speak Turkish when there are clients. It

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would have a negative impact [on my business]” (1999:22). And then, he says how he wants to import shirts from Turkey, but does not want a tag that says “Made in Turkey” on them, pointing to the animosity that it might engender in people’s imaginations (Yalçin 1999:22).

There are two things which are significant in Samog¨

lu’s encounter with Kemal Yalçin: he confronts Yalçin’s self-identification as a leftist and suggests that Yalçin write an account that challenges the monologism prevalent in official history narratives in both Greece and Turkey. Samog¨

lu guesses that Yalçin must be a leftist because he is interested in the exchange and traveled to Greece, but then he asks: “Why did you not say anything when there was so much pressure on us in Istanbul after the 1960s?” (1999:22). Consequently, Yalçin also questions himself in the book: “I was embarrassed of our incomplete [understanding of] leftism [in those days]” (1999:22). This self-questioning is also repeated in the book when Yalçin finally returns to Turkey after 13 years:

Did I really know my friends that I grew up together with, that I played with, our neighbors [mübadil from Greece]? Did I even ask them once where they came from, how and why; the reason why their faces were clouded with sadness? No. . . . How were we educated, what kind of education did we receive that it never occurred to me to ask these questions all these years? I am ashamed of my own insensitivity. (1999:176)

Yalçin’s questioning of his own education speaks to the processing of collective memory repertoires in public and in schools and the models of thinking such education system promotes. In this sense, the importance of education in shaping repertoires of self-identification and history crystallizes in Yalçin’s self-questioning statement. It seems as though not only the official historiography, but also other discourses such as socialism in Turkey did not have a space for articulating self-identificatory differences other than in the context of the socio-economic class struggle.

As such, if memory is a repertoire processed publicly, where individuals are exposed to particular discourses in the public domain, the school environment is definitely one such setting where individual repertoires are processed. Offering particular models of thinking about self-identification and identification of others and ruptures, school education powerfully informs repertoires, as Yalçin realizes in his encounter with Samog¨

lu. As such, individuals might learn from public discourses, including those circulating in schools and textbooks and, in turn, might resort to these models in making sense of the others and themselves. Kemal Yalçin had previously questioned the class struggle in Turkey, but the fact that he was not aware of other types of plights, despite his exposure to them as a child growing up in Denizli surrounded by the mübadil, suggests how

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education and national discourses obviate ruptures and causes the turning of a blind eye to history and identificatory differences. As for the second important statement Hristo Samog¨

lu makes, it is closely related to this issue:

What good is there to be enemies for people in Greece and in Turkey? Both governments are guilty in this. There is a meeting in Korfu these days where government heads and state presidents of the European Union will get together. Today Greece vetoes Turkey. One day Cyprus will also enter the EU. Cyprus will veto Turkey too. There is no end to this! One has to live in peace. There are good and bad human beings. People will become human when wars are over in the world! Until then, people will remain animals! Both sides have bad sides. It is easy to support the Turkish side and curse Greeks. You can also write a book like that. But such books are sold by kilos! You can [also] support the Greek side and blame the Turkish side. It is easy. The difficult thing is to see the good and bad in both sides and to write that. (1999:23)

Samog¨

lu’s statement is telling in showing his point of view on the abundant examples of monologic narratives, and that what is difficult is to be able to write a polyphonic account of the Greek-Turkish common past. In this sense, Yalçin’s book can be interpreted as an effort to bring different memories of the exchange into the public domain. Therefore, not only is the book about a rupture, but the content of the book can be construed as a rupture of the official versions of historicizing Greeks as enemies and Turks as the good protagonists in the shared history between Greece and Turkey, or vice versa in Greece.

Through the use of documentary narrative strategies and eyewitness accounts, Yalçin characterizes the population exchange as a plight for many and invites his audiences to refigure their assumptions of national identification and homogeneity, while at the same time bringing to light individual narratives of geographic identification and sensescapes. Geography and sensescapes, on the other hand, invite the Turkish-speaking public to connect mentally with them and recognize the pain of the exchanged peoples. Yalçin’s goal in writing this is clear. In the opening pages of the book, he quotes his own mother: “If you write, then write these [stories]! So that they are not forgotten, so that this pain is not relived again!” Of course, many mübadil whom Yalçin interviewed were very young when they left Greece or Turkey, and this suggests that mübadil probably related what they learned from their families or what they themselves made of their families’ narratives or emotions in their own adulthood. This is an example of how individual repertoires are spiraling from families and public discourses to mübadil and then, from mübadil

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stories to the complex genre, the documentary novel. As such, these narratives have been made public and opened a space for processing public repertoires and negotiating self-identification and national history. This does not mean that everybody engages the stories in the same way, but that individual stories of the population exchange have found a public circuit in contemporary Turkey through a documentary novel.

While The Entrusted Trousseau received the Ministry of Culture’s novel prize in 1998 and was recommended to the Ministry of Education as supplementary reading in high schools, more nationalistic state officials who did not welcome dissent from official history were responsible for the prosecution of the book and its author in 2002. In other words, polyphony was prosecuted by monologism. Even if The Trousseau itself is not a history book per se, the historical event that is at its center, and the stories of the plight of those exchanged, were interpreted by the prosecutors of the book and its author as being in undesirable dissonance with official narratives.

On the other hand, the trousseau, the centerpiece of the book, is not only an object that was the reason Yalçin’s journey during which he met all the mübadil on his quest to find Sofiya, the owner of the trousseau, but it also has symbolic significance: a trousseau, prepared for a Greek Orthodox girl that had to be left behind in the care of Muslim neighbors, can be interpreted as symbolic of hope for return (to reclaim the home and trousseau) and for the future (to prepare for the wedding needs of a young girl) that highlights humanity beyond labels of nationality and religion. This might also be one of the reasons the Entrusted Trousseau is such a significant vehicle for publicizing the personal stories of the mübadil.

Conclusion

As Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us, each setting, each sphere creates its own kind of utterance (1996). This is true in contemporary Turkey where documentary genres have emerged in a context in which individual stories gain a new kind of purchase and significance in terms of rewriting and reconsidering the past. This can be construed as an individualized manner of rewriting history, albeit not professionally. Documentary genres function politically and invite their intended audiences to give meaning to their context and themselves and others through narrativization. Through the example of The Trousseau, it has been shown how this dynamic introduces new conceptualizations of the past and self-identificatory practices, such as attachments to the land, crystallized in sensescape narratives or the names that communities gave each other, such as “natives” or

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“Greek seed.” In other words, what is readily available to individuals in their repertories to make sense of their history and geography, but also of themselves and other peoples, informed by individual experiences and national discourses learned in school textbooks for example, is reconfigured through different means in Turkey, and cultural products perform an instrumental function in this process.

Does the narrative of a “plot” confirm the meanings already extant in the repertories or does it suggest new interpretations, new narrativizations, through its configuration? Documentary genres are reconfigurations of readily available concepts and interpretations of new meanings such as inviting audiences to consider Greeks not as enemies, but as kin bound to the citizens of Turkey through a common geography and shared history. Sensescapes, on the other hand, embody nostalgia for the lost homeland, offering a new kind of legibility—reading of personal history traced to the place of origin that becomes an anchor for identity.

As such, cultural products in general, and documentary genres in particular, both make available and invite new understandings and conceptualizations of ruptures and self-identification. With the eye-witness accounts that become public in the body of documentary genres, readers are invited to engage the stories they are exposed to as real stories of ruptures, arguably more effectively than fiction.

While individual accounts contribute to the “documentary” aspect of the stories conveyed through “novels,” (documentary) films, family histories, and memoirs, at the same time they speak to and are fed by the contemporary discourses of personalizing and popularizing history. By putting individuals at the center, such factual stories bring plurality to the narratives of the past ruptures, as each individual experiences and narrates an event differently. Additionally, these narratives anchor personal identification to different geographies, rendered legible or meaningful through family histories conveyed as “legacies.”

Another inevitable consequence of this is more public articulation of differences in self-identifications in the public domain. It can be argued that the rise of nationalism, increasingly visible in Turkey (especially since the early 2000s) and often attributed to the treatment of the negotiations of Turkey’s candidacy for membership in the European Union, might also be in part a reaction to the discourses and cultural politics that bring descriptions of ruptures and individual stories of historical events to the public domain. Of course, reconsidering the past through eye-witness accounts is not unproblematic; the idea of filling the gaps in collective memory repertories through making “private” stories public, with the individual treated as an informant, is a valuable attempt. And yet, just like anything else, memory is mediated, and while eye-witness accounts

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contribute to individualizing and personalizing history, they should also be analyzed as such and subject to scrutiny. As for the question of why these changes occur now, it definitely deserves more attention and is the topic for another article, but, briefly, it is my sense, based on interviews with numerous individuals and research, that 1) the development of information technology that facilitates access to families, places, etc. on the web 2) the violence that marked the 1990s with the armed conflicts with the PKK [the principal Kurdish separatist organization in Turkey] 3) the brutality of competing nationalisms 4) the postmodern query for questioning one’s identity and the demand for the particular as Rebecca Bryant also suggests (2004:5) 5) the popularization of history as exemplified by several projects launched by Tarih Vakfi (The History Foundation) and 6) the rapprochement between the Greek and Turkish nation-states after the 1999 earthquakes can all be counted among the factors that have played a role in the juncture that enabled the production and circulation of such cultural products and personal histories.

Finally, documentary genres emerge as instrumentally configured cultural products, and while there are many examples that bring polyphony to the negotiations of the past in the public domain, other cultural professionals with different goals also resort to documenting strategies to convey their messages, whether they are nationalistic or have other agendas. One could argue that the contemporary discourses of individualizing and personalizing history have brought new value to individual memory and documentary narrative strategies, which in turn opens the field of cultural production to epistemological approaches to cultural products and individual writers who do not necessarily use imagination as a writing strategy.

In other words, contemporary Turkey’s field of cultural production seems to be more dominantly governed by epistemological concerns than aesthetic ones, opening the field to individual writers who deem their stories worthy of telling beyond literariness. What is at stake for literature in Turkey as a result of this is still a subject for further analysis; however, it is important to note that similar to what Bakhtin argues, as each sphere or context creates its own utterance modes, the contemporary public domain in Turkey has been in the process of creating its own generic utterance modes at the intersections of the discourses of reconsidering, personalizing, and individualizing history through documentary genres.

SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

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NOTES

Acknowledgments. I am grateful to the American Research Institute in Turkey and to Horace H. Rackham Graduate School, the Program in Modern Greek Studies, and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan for their generous contribution to my research for this project. I would also like to thank Rebecca Bryant and David Sutton for their kind patience and generous comments and feedback on this article.

1 The awards The Trousseau received include the Ministry of Culture’s Novel Success Prize and the (Abdi) Ipekçi Greek-Turkish Friendship and Peace Prize. The novel has also been translated into Greek and published under the title: Mia Proika Amanati.

2 Mübadil is now an institutionalized identification marker (not only for the people subjected to the Greek-Turkish population exchange, but also for their family members) with the founding of the Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfi in the early 2000s.

3 I would like to thank Rebecca Bryant for kindly reminding me that in addition to being used by the institutionalized travel groups organizing trips to Greece, this slogan was also imprinted on t-shirts and coffee mugs and thus became incorporated into the material culture at yet another level.

4 Briefly, what I mean by rupture here is twofold. First, I use this term as an interruption in how one used to make sense of one’s surroundings, such as the social codes or daily life habits, and/or in self-identification of individuals due to political and socio-cultural changes, implemented by others or by political power(s), both violently and nonviolently. Next, as a phenomenon that emerges in the public domain through various media, such as cultural products; in other words, as a penetration into the public domain. I deliberately refrain from using such terms as “trauma” and “uprooted cultures” here. While these are valuable terms that call attention to hardships and ordeals, when used as categories of analysis, they risk becoming self-explanatory categories that suggest how the rupture must have been experienced by individuals, risking homogenizing experiences of the event and providing a dangerous paradigm of “authenticity.”

5 I return to this subject and provide the historical background below.

6 One telling example for this is the increase of the “Greek” winehouses across Pera, Istanbul, in the early 2000s. While most owners were Muslim businessmen, some of these so-called Greek winehouses had non-Greek names, such as Victor Levi in Galata, who was a Jew from Istanbul. His place is “Hellenized” with imitations of ancient Greek statues, art, and Greek columns with only Greek music, ranging from rembetika to Eleftheria Arvanitaki. I have shown elsewhere that such commodification of Greeks from Istanbul was symptomatic of selective nostalgia for a “cosmopolitan” past, disregarding the contemporary cosmopolitanism of Istanbul with immigrants coming both from abroad (such as Moldovans), or from other parts from Turkey (such as Kurds), or other groups already living there (e.g., the Roma [gypsies]) (2001b).

7 Stuart Hall argues that “meanings are produced at several different sites and circulated through several different processes and practices,” which he calls the “cultural circuit” (2002:1–11). My use of public circuit here is similar, but rather than putting the emphasis on “culture” as Hall does, my emphasis is on the availability of such circuits in the public domain, such as the internet, various media, and cultural products.

8 “Polyphony” does not conflate plural “voices”—polyvocality—with representation or recognition in the way it is used here. Rather, I suggest that polyphony is the availability of public circuits to express alternative opinions, counter-positions, different experiences and stories, and the absence of implementing hegemony or dominance with these dissonant public expressions through intimidation, violence, or legal measures. Polyphony is crucial

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in the meaning-making process concerning a phenomenon; as the multiple stories about a phenomenon become publicly accessible, they contribute to different understandings of it. That is, such public stories open a space for negotiating the past.

9 My goal in putting the word “origin” in quotations is not to undermine individual conceptualizations of self-identification, but rather, to point out the complicated relationship between individuals and origins; especially in former Ottoman provinces it is very difficult to trace one’s origin to any particular reference point given the fact that there were dynamic population movements and resettlement policies, relocations and exiles, and, of course, conversion. In this sense, where one’s origins lie becomes an individual choice. One anchors one’s self-identification by choosing a reference point.

10 Sensescapes emerge as a trope in many population exchange narratives: not having immediate access to the lost homeland, many mübadil narrate their homelands through sensory tropes, referring to the smells, sounds, the taste of food (especially fruits and vegetables), or songs of the geography of origin. Elsewhere, I have argued that sensescapes provide a rhetorical mental bridge for the present inhabitants of Anatolia to relate to the past inhabitants of the same geography; in these tropes, what is central is not landscapes, but the sensescape (2006). I have also shown that such narratives configure Anatolia as a discursive womb, highlighting the implications of what I call “geographic kinship” that eclipses national and religious divides: all peoples being born from the soil of Asia Minor are thus constructed as kin due to a shared geographic origin (2007:162–187). Likewise, in The Senses Still, C. Nadia Seremetakis argues that when the memory of the senses fails because there are no people who can awaken the knowledge of an object in their own bodies, the loss itself becomes an element of public culture (1996). The Turkish context operates differently as these “losses” have only recently become a public concern and “loss,” “displacement,” and “pain” are rather recent categories in public discourse about the Greek-Turkish population exchange, probably because national ideologies did not open a favorable public space for expressions of difference and plights of displacement as publicly acceptable categories and aimed at homogenization instead.

11 In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym approaches nostalgia through notions of modernity and collective memory and differentiates two types of nostalgia: restorative, which she attributes to an emphasis of nostos, and explains it as a national return to origins and conspiracy; and reflective nostalgia, which she argues emphasizes alghos, as an exploration of multiple forms of existence across time and space. Thus, according to Boym, this “typology of nostalgia allows us to distinguish between national memory that is based on a single plot of national identity, and social memory, which consists of collective frameworks that mark but do not define the individual memory” (2001:xviii, 41–56). The case of the mübadil, on the other hand, illustrates a different take on the questions of nostalgia with an emphasis on both the individual and the collective, as well as engaging nostos and alghos simultaneously at different levels that fit into both restorative and reflective nostalgia paradigms as described by Boym without necessarily falling into the nationalist conceptualizations Boym proposes to consider restorative nostos.

12 Eye-witness accounts can be found in travel writings of the nineteenth and twentiethcentury Ottoman and Turkish intellectuals, for example; in this sense it can be argued that this subjectivity is not a new one. On the other hand, what is also true is that, in these earlier narratives it was not the accounts of “ordinary” individuals that were made public through memoirs and travelogues. And yet, in contemporary Turkey, the shift in the importance of eye-witness stature lies precisely in the fact that it is the stories and memories of “ordinary” individuals that become public. They gain a new authority to tell their stories in public, as their stories become representatives of experiences of an event, configured as embodiments

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of history that might shed light to past events. For a different take on the trend of making “private” stories public, see Esra Özyürek’s Nostalgia for the Modern (2006).

13 This number is now assumed to be around 1,500,000. See for example Renée Hirschon (2003), Kemal Ari (1995), and Ayhan Aktar (2003).

14 For the text of the protocol in English, see League of Nations Treaty Series (1925: 77–87).

15 Perhaps this was because the refugees of the catastrophe were somehow reminiscent of the Hellenic presence in Asia Minor. For more on the subject, see Penelope Papailias (2005). As such, the fact that the Asia Minor catastrophe was recollected much earlier in Greece does not necessarily mean that the Muslims who left were equally publicly remembered. This, in fact, is also a relatively more recent phenomenon increasingly visible in public domains in Greece. Thus, the dynamics that informed politics of recollection might not have been too different after all: a more selective public memory that excluded that which did not fit into the national restorative nostalgia paradigms that both traced the roots of origin to Asia Minor, which in Turkey’s case accompanied the roots-tracing narratives in Central Asia. Some recent internationally popular books include Louis De Bernières’s Corelli’s Mandolin (1994), Birds without Wings (2005), and Bruce Clarke’s Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Greece and Turkey (2006). Reviews of de Bernières’s novels and interviews with him hint at the extent to which the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory population exchange is little known internationally. For such examples see Geraldine Bedell’s interview with the author (2004) or Robert Hanks’s review of Birds Without Wings (2004).

16 Ruptures experienced in colonial settings have been largely addressed in conjunction with colonizer-subaltern dynamics. Whereas these are very important steps in negotiating the past and a significant contribution of postcolonial studies, the question of how the ruptures experienced in settings that have no such immediate relevance to today’s socalled “Western” powers, or to their larger communities find international public circuits, remains open to discussion.

17 Ayvalik, the birthplace of the Greek writer Elias Venezis and known as Ayvali to the Greek speaking public, is an important site for the exchange of populations and falls within the city limits of Balikesir. It is on the west coast of Turkey very near the Greek island of Lesbos.

18 For some insight on how a nationalized self-esteem was constructed in the field of historiography, see First and Second Turkish History Congress minutes in “Konferanslar, Müzakere Zabitlari” in Birinci Türk Tarih Kongresi (1932) and “Kongrenin Çalis*

malari, Kongreye Sunulan Teblig¨

ler 20–25 Eylül 1937” in Ikinci Türk Tarih Kongresi (1943). As for constructions of national identity such as Turkish that endorse a national pride and selfesteem in the field of literature, see Inan (1959:272–273) and Köprülü (2006:1–26).

19 This does not mean such prosecutions of acts deemed to be against Turkishness did not go through a change over time. The reason why I reference these connections is to point out the importance of investigating the socio-political structures that empower such acts of “banning” historically, and not solely as a civil rights issue, which, of course, it is. Lack of tolerance for dissidence in the public domain, however, also needs be unpacked in its own right. I have examined elsewhere such reactions against public displays of dissidence in contemporary Turkey. For more on this, see Repertoires of Rupture (2006:66–134).

20 The questions of national literature and the roles attributed to them are crucial and considering only Atatürk’s ideas about it is obviously not sufficient since literature is a complex entity that cannot be simplified as such. And yet, his conceptualization of literature is a telling example of how much national dignity was taken seriously in the

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nation-state building process in Turkey, and to what extent literature was attributed a pedagogical role in that context.

21 For example, before the application of European Union candidacy regulations in Turkey that generated some reshuffling and changes in laws in the past decade, making public claims to Kurdishness could have legal consequences, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s as in the case of musician, Hasan Saltik, who was prosecuted for recording the Kurdish album Newroz in the late 1980s (Ig¨

siz 2007:185). Another striking example of how the past is a contested site is the organization of the academic conference, “Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy,” at the prestigious Bog¨

aziçi (Bosphorus) University in Istanbul, Turkey. The conference met with great resistance and had to be postponed for four months before it finally took place in September 2005, but not without difficulties. In fact, the questions raised by the conference divided public forums in Turkey. The statement of Minister of Justice Cemil Çiçek (of the political party AKP) that the conference was “treason to Turkey” created further turmoil. The headlines of Turkish daily Radikal on 25 May 2005 are typical: “Konferans Ertelendi” (“The Conference has been Postponed”).

22 For some works on the subject that analyze the exchange in the Turkish context see also Ayhan Aktar (2003; 2000); Baskin Oran (2003); Çag¨

tirilmis) speaks to the concerns of other scholars on the subject, including Salih Özbaran (1992, 1997, 1998) and Çag¨

lar Keyder (2003).

24 For other such works on contemporary Turkey, see especially the special issue on Social Memory of New Perspectives on Turkey (2006) and Esra Özyürek’s edited volume The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey (2007). Similarly, the History Foundation of Turkey (Tarih Vakfi) has launched numerous projects on oral and local history in Turkey. See their website for their projects: <http://www.tarihvakfi.org.tr/english/historyfoundationofturkey.asp>

25 In The Field of Cultural Production (1993), Pierre Bourdieu argues that each field (e.g. economics and cultural production [literature and art]) has its own logic and guiding principles. While his work offers crucial insights into the field of literary studies, I do not refer to his model in this article when I mention the field of cultural production. My use of the term here is simply to denote the practices of cultural production, such as documentaries, films, novels, (auto)biographies, memoirs, family histories, cookbooks, and music albums that constitute the field of cultural production beyond conceptualizations of literature as imaginative works of fiction or universalist approaches to aesthetics.

26 In Western Europe, French philosopher and father of sociology, Auguste Comte, bridged natural and human sciences in the 1830s by recommending the application of scientific methods in other fields of knowledge (Moran 2002:11). His suggestion to use clearly defined methodologies in the “non-sciences,” similar to the sciences, is “a powerful factor in the development of new social science and humanities disciplines . . . in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Moran 2002:11). Comte’s premise is to construct a scientific method to study society, and partly due to his postulate, the field of history arose as a social science.

27 According to historian John Warren, the “tradition of historical scholarship associated with Ranke provided, and continues to provide, a defence against contemporary political and/or philosophical trends that opponents see as fraudulent or dangerous” (2003:25). To this, Warren gives the example of the January 2000 trial of the academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books that published her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (2003:23). The plaintiff was the internationally known historian, David Irving, who was arrested because of his Holocaust denial. The defense and discussions

Greco-Turkish Population Exchange in Contemporary Turkey 477

in the London trial clustered around questions of scientific truth, objective scholarship, and documentary evidence (Warren 2003:23–24). What is interesting in the Turkish case, however, is the fact that the historiographic legacy attributed to Ranke takes a major part in the discourse of proponents of the official version of what happened to the Armenians. But it is not limited to this case; this rhetoric also takes place in any nationalist discourse on perceived threats, such as criticism of certain past and present policies in Turkey. Needless to say, other scholars engage nationalist discourses with the same rhetoric: they also claim scientific truth, documentary evidence, and objectivity. In short, the roles of scientific methods, truth, and the vital importance of documents in the process of writing history are still debated today. And documents, in this sense, feed discourses of truth. As such, objectivity, scientific “truth,” and documentary proof are still very much present in Turkey’s public domain, but unfortunately they lack a critical engagement with the material at hand—a phenomenon that some describe as “document fetishism.”

28 This statement is based on my interviews with the author and the publishers at Dog¨

an Yayincilik. While it is difficult to know the exact number of copies the book has sold, the book has gone through six editions, one in Belge, four in Dog¨

an, and one in Birzamanlar Yayincilik that reprinted The Trousseau in 2005.

29 The events of 6–7 September 1955 are considered an example of state policies against religious minorities in Turkey. A false rumor that the birth house of Turkey’s founding father Atatürk in Salonika, Greece was bombed by Greeks was printed in Turkish newspapers and quickly resulted in the mobilization of mobs against the Rum (Greek Orthodox) of Istanbul. Their houses and properties were looted on 6–7 September 1955 and there were a number of assaults, some resulting in deaths.

30 See Ig¨

siz for the interviews conducted with Muslim mübadil (2006). 31 I would like to thank Rebecca Bryant for reminding me this point.

2003 “Homogenising the Nation, Turkifying the Economy.” In Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, edited by Renée Hirschon. Studies in Forced Migration, vol. 12, 79–95. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

(History Education and the Problem of the “Other” in History). Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi

Yurt Yayinlari.

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Göçek, Fatma Müge 2002 “Decline of the Ottoman Empire and the Emergence of Greek, Armenian, Turkish, and Arab Nationalisms.” In Social Constructions of Nationalism in the Middle East, edited by Fatma Müge Göçek, 15–84. New York: SUNY Press. 2002 “The Politics of History and Memory: A Multidimensional Analysis of the Lausanne Peace Conference, 1922–23.” In Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions, edited by Israel Gershoni, Hakan Erdem, and Ursula Woköck, 207–228. Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner. 2005 “Defining the Parameters of a Post-Nationalist Turkish Historiography through the Case of the Anatolian Armenians.” In Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Postnationalist Identities, edited by Hans Lukas Kieser, 85–103. New York: I.B. Tauris.

i Ulusal Kimlik” (“Three Dimensional Stories: Anatolian Civilizations Museum and its National Identity Representation from the Eyes of the Visitors from Turkey”). In Hatirladiklariyla Ve Unuttuklariyla Türkiye’nin Toplumsal Hafizasi (Forgotten and Remembered Social Memory of Turkey), edited by Esra Özyürek, 215–248. Istanbul: Iletis*

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2007 “Stories in Three Dimensions: Narratives of Nation and the Antolian Civilizations Museum.” In Politics of Memory in Turkey, edited by Esra Özyürek, 40–69. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Hall, Stuart 1980 Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. London, Birmingham, and West Midlands: Hutchinson; Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of the University of Birmingham. 1986 “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” In Culture, Ideology, and Social Process: A

Hanks, Robert 2004 Review of Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières. The Independent 9 July. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/birdswithout- wings-by-louis-de-berniatildeiquestres-552492.html

Herzfeld, Michael 1997 Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge.

Hirschon, Renée 1988 Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. New York and Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hirschon, Renée, editor 2003 Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey. Studies in Forced Migration Series, vol. 12. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

2007 “Polyphony and Geographic Kinship in Anatolia: Framing the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange.” In The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey, edited by Esra Özyürek, 162–187. Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East Series. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Irzik, Gürol, and Deniz Tarba Ceylan, editors 2005 How Are We Educated? International Symposium on Human Rights Education and Textbook Research April 17–18 2004, Istanbul. Istanbul: The History Foundation of Turkey.

Kasaba, Res*at 1998 “Eski ile Yeni Arasinda Kemalizm Ve Modernizm” (“Kemalism and Modernism between the Old and the New”). In Türkiye’de Modernles*

me Ve Ulusal Kimlik (Modernization and National Identity in Turkey), edited by Res*

at Kasaba and Sibel Bozdog¨

an, 21–28. Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yurt Yayinlari.

Keyder, Çag¨lar 2003 “The Consequences of the Exchange of Populations for Turkey.” In Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, edited by Renée Hirschon. Studies in Forced Migration Series, vol. 12, 39–52. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Köker, Tolga 2003 “Lessons in Refugeehood: The Experience of Forced Migrants in Turkey.” In Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, edited by Renée Hirschon. Studies in Forced Migration, vol. 12, 193–208. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

2003 “The Professionalization and Institutionalization of History.” In Writing History: Theory and Practice, edited by Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner, and Kevin Passmore, 42–62. New York and London: Arnold.

Langlois, Charles-Victor and Charles Seignobos 1898 Introduction to the Study of History. Translated by G. G. Berry. New York: Barnes and Noble.

Layoun, Mary 2001 Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Linde, Charlotte 1993 Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lloyd, Christopher

2003 “History and the Social Sciences.” In Writing History: Theory and Practice, edited by Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner, and Kevin Passmore, 83–103. London and New York: Arnold.

Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfi 2006 <http://www.lozanmubadilleri.org>.

Malkki, Liisa

1997 “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.” In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 52–74. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Marks, Laura 2000 The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

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Mavrogordatos, George 1983 The Stillborn Republic: Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922–1936. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Millas, Herkül (Hercules) 1991 “History Textbooks in Greece and Turkey.” History Workshop 31 (Spring): 21–33. 2003 “The Exchange of Populations in Turkish Literature: The Undertone of Texts.” In Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, edited by Renée Hirschon. Studies in Forced Migration, vol. 12, 221–235. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Oran, Baskin 2003 “The Story of Those Who Stayed: Lessons from Articles 1 and 2 of the 1923 Convention.” In Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchanged between Greece and Turkey, edited by Renée Hirschon. Studies in Forced Migration, vol. 12, 97–116. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Özdog¨an, Günay Göksu 2001 “Turan”dan “Bozkurt”a: Tek Parti Döneminde Türkçülük (1931–1946) (From Turan to the Grey Wolf: Turkism in the Period of the Single Party 1931–1946). Istanbul: Iletis*

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Özsoy, Iskender 2003 Iki Vatan Yorgunlari: Mübadele Acisini Yas*

ayanlar Anlatiyor (The Exhausted [People] of Two [Mother]lands: Those who Suffered the [Greek-Turkish] Population Exchange Tell their Stories). Istanbul: Bag¨

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Özyürek, Esra 2006 Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. 2007 Politics of Public Memory in Turkey. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

2004 “Oral History as Genre.” In Narrative and Genre: Contexts and Types of Communication, edited by Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson. Memory and Narrative Series, 23–45. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers.

Ricoeur, Paul 1984 Time and Narrative. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 1. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago. 1988 Time and Narrative. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 3. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. 2004 Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Rosenberg, Milla

2003 “Race, Ethnicity and History.” In Writing History: Theory and Practice, edited by Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner, and Kevin Passmore, 282–298. London and New York: Arnold.

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Yazarlar

oral accounts of the exchanged peoples from both Greece and Turkey whom the author met during his journey in his search for the owners of the trousseau—received immediate public attention and many awards in Turkey.1 But it raised questions regarding its genre: was this really a novel or a collection of oral history accounts? When I asked him why he chose to present this book as a novel, even though there was little fiction in it, Yalçin replied that, at that time, he did not think the Turkish public was “ready” for another genre to introduce this tragedy and that he reached a larger audience through presenting his story as a novel. This choice was strategic and his book is one of the earliest examples in Turkey of the now recurring genre, “documentary novel.”

A year later, in 1999, a group of second generation mübadil (exchanged people),2 originally from Greece and now established in Turkey, started a foundation in Istanbul for the people of the exchange, “Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfi” (literally, “Foundation for Lausanne Exchangees”) and began collecting oral history accounts. They built a website and established an email list that hosts more than 900 people, sponsored conferences and documentaries on the exchange, compiled recipes, archived photographs and other documents belonging to the mübadil, collaborated with their counterpart organizations in Greece, such as the members of the Association of People from Asia Minor of Rethymnon, and organized trips to their families’ homeland which many had never seen before with the slogan, “Greetings the soil of my birth!” (“Merhaba dog¨¨

dugum toprak!”).3 When interviewed, some of the founders identified the role of both the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey and Greece and The Entrusted Trousseau in raising an awareness of their family’s cultural background. Turkish state officials, on the other hand, first honored the novel with the Ministry of Culture’s 1998 Novel Success Prize. Then, in 2002, other state officials filed a complaint and prosecuted the book and author, citing the content of the book as “offensive” and an “insult” to Turkish national identity. The novel and its author have subsequently been acquitted.

As the fate of The Entrusted Trousseau indicates, history is a site of heated debates in Turkey, especially when the object of discussion is past ruptures4 such as the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory population exchange.5 Contemporary documentary genres play an important role in making past ruptures public and in articulating self-identification(s) by anchoring “identity” in the memory of a place. Cultural products, such as documentary films, novels, memoirs, and family cookbooks have opened a space in the public domain of Turkey over the past two decades, both to reconsider the past and rewrite history at an individual level.

Furthermore, by engaging with the past, this shift is symptomatic

Greco-Turkish Population Exchange in Contemporary Turkey 453

of nostalgia at two different levels: first, a publicly-constructed nostalgia for a pre-nation-state “multiculturalism” or diversity crystallized in public representations of different groups, including the Greek Orthodox community from Istanbul in the early 2000s, for example, which became emblematic of a selective nostalgia for Istanbul’s “past cosmopolitanism.”6 Additionally, the proliferation of individual histories traced to different personal maps—mediated through cultural products and other public circuits7—wove the diverse fabric of the past and present peoples of Asia Minor (Anatolia), the heartland of Turkey today, through personal and now-public histories. This shift might also be considered as making alternative histories public and thus bringing a plurality or polyphony (Ig¨

siz 2007:165)8 to the more straightforward nationalist official historiography that contains homogenizing tendencies of the past and present peoples in Turkey (e.g., representations of Greeks as enemies or all Muslims as Turks, etc.) as embodied in school textbooks and problematized by various scholars in the recent years (Çotuksöken, Erzan, and Silier 2003; Irzik and Tarba Ceylan 2005; Ersanli 2003; Göçek 2006:107; Millas 1991:21–33; Özbaran 1998:61–69; Stathis 1998:125–134).

Second, national identification practices and nationalist historiography were geared toward erasing differences and diversity to create one “homogeneous” nation of the Muslim millet (an Ottoman identification system) as “Turks” in the geography of nationalized territory (Aktar 2003:79–95; Bali 2001; Çag¨

lu 2004; Okutan 2004; Özdogan 2001; Özyürek 2007:1–15). But we see a reversal of this equation in some milieus in the 1990s: an increasing trend of personalization of geography through familial attributes and memories became an anchor for self-identification, rendered traceable through family history and personal narratives in the public domain. In other words, the longing for personal history is materialized in the form of recollecting family history and tracing these histories to maps of “origin.”9 One way this is manifested in the context of the mübadil relocated both in Greece and Turkey is what I call “sensescapes.”10

While some scholars correctly explain the growing interest in and nostalgia for the past through disillusionment with the present and future in Turkey (Neyzi 2002:137–158; Özyürek 2007:2), it is also true that the “postmodern demand” for particularism and asking the question, “who are we?” seem to have caught up in contemporary Turkey as well (Bryant 2004:5). Obviously, the question of juncture is also important in the more recent public interest in the population exchange: the 1999 earthquakes in the Aegean followed by a rapprochement between Greece and Turkey,

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the collaboration of the foreign ministers of the two countries, and increased questioning of competing nationalisms and state policies in Turkey, perhaps also triggered by Kurdish claims for self-identification, are all important factors.

As such, contemporary narratives of longing for the past and the lost homeland among the mübadil and their family members can be viewed as nostalgia11 for a traceable family history and a tool for identity work, eclipsing the uniform identification overwritten by state-sponsored narratives. Thus, at a personal level, familial references might be interpreted as an alghos (longing or grief) for the nostos (return home, also interpreted here as a return to the family “origins”) as exemplified by the slogan, “Greetings the soil of my birth!” that succinctly captures this dynamic. It is an attempt to return to family homeland soil, both literally and metaphorically through narratives of sensescapes, a geographically informed self-identification trope that conveys nostalgia for lost homelands and a sensory return to the place of “origin,” which is especially significant for the second and third generation mübadil as means to reconnect with family histories.

In this context, documenting the past through cultural products in general and documentary genres in particular emerges as a narrative strategy to address past ruptures in contemporary Turkey, such as the Greek-Turkish exchange of populations. While documentary novels such as the Entrusted Trousseau contribute to considering new ways of reconnecting with the past, both at a personal and public level, they also open a space for public articulations of plurality by putting individual experiences at their center. This initiative can be considered as a move away from the uniformity of nationalized identity narratives of official historiography exemplified in school textbooks, towards plurality in publicly expressed self-identifications. This move, however, as valuable as it is, is not unproblematic as individual accounts are increasingly presented as those of eye-witnesses, often equated with being straightforward “informants,” while at the same time eye-witness stature is configured as an authoritative position that can shed light on past events in contemporary Turkey’s public domain. This of course does not mean eye-witness accounts did not exist before, but rather, because of the present moment they gain a relatively new meaning as documents of the past.12

History and literature: contested sites of memory and identification

“History’s greatest trek. . . .” writes Melville Chater in the November 1925 issue of the National Geographic, “Tragedy stalks through the Near East as Greece and Turkey exchange two million of their people” (1925:533).13

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This “tragedy,” as Chater states, was a forced migration of religiouslyidentified groups—Muslims and Greek-Orthodox Christians—implemented in the form of an exchange of these peoples between two nation states.

Following the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish War in Asia Minor, the Lausanne Convention was signed in January 1923. Article One in the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations and Protocol states:

As from the 1st May, 1923, there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory. These persons shall not return to live in Turkey or Greece respectively without the authorisation of the Turkish Government or of the Greek Government respectively.14

Excluded from the exchange were about 200,000 Greek Orthodox in Istanbul since Greek Christians who arrived in Istanbul after 30 October 1918 were not considered inhabitants of the city and, therefore, would not be subject to the exchange. Likewise, a number of Muslims living in Western Thrace, close to the Turkish border in Greece, were also excluded from this forced migration.

The Lausanne Convention that specified the conditions of the exchange “set a precedent in international politics,” anthropologist Renée Hirschon argues, and it is “used as a reference point in discussions about subsequent mass population displacements in many parts of the world” (2003:xiv). And yet, despite its early characterizations as “history’s greatest trek” and as a colossal “tragedy,” and its later impact on discussions of mass displacements in international politics, such as the partition of India and Pakistan and their exchange of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, the Greco-Turkish population exchange was surprisingly absent in the official memory in Turkey and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in Greece where, articulated as the Asia Minor Catastrophe, it is recollected much earlier, not only through cultural products, but also archives such as those of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies. For decades these publicly recollected stories were those of the arriving Orthodox communities rather than of the departing Muslims (Papailias 2005:1–138, 2001:267–298; Doulis 1977).15 In this sense, the record of the Muslims who left Greece—before, during, or after the exchange—in public repertoires through books or films is also a relatively more recent phenomenon in Greece.

“Forgotten” for decades, the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory religious minority exchange has only recently started receiving wider attention, not only in international arenas other than Greece, but

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also in Turkey. Whereas the international lack of interest in the event, despite international involvement in the ratification and execution of the exchange and its impacts on global politics, raises questions about what happens to such ruptures in non-postcolonial settings in international public domains and how they are treated.16 The dynamics in Turkey are rather different as Turkish nationalist history has ignored questions of discrimination against arriving communities; the exchanged Muslims were expected to melt into the Turkish national identification pot, constructed and consolidated with official history.

In this context, new initiatives geared towards Turkification were taken in different arenas in the 1920s. For example, in the case of language, in 1928 a new campaign was launched promoting the use of Turkish in public spaces: “Citizen, speak Turkish!” This campaign targeted people whose mother tongue was not Turkish, and different groups such as Jews, Armenians, and Greek Orthodox, but also Cretan Muslims who came as part of the population exchange and did not necessarily speak Turkish. Constraints were implemented on the use of other languages in public spaces such as restaurants, trams, and theaters. Rifat Bali points out that some Turkish municipalities, such as Balikesir and Bergama (Pergamon), fined those who did not speak Turkish in public during the late 1920s (2001:134–135). Both Bergama and Balikesir were places of resettlement for large groups of the mübadil arriving from Greece. In fact, Balikesir took in 33,132 refugees, approximately 15% of the total coming to Turkey (Ari 1995:113).17

According to Bali, the campaign calling for speaking Turkish was at first met with negative reactions from different communities. Some would sit under signs reading, “Citizen, speak Turkish!” and speak their own language or simply tear down the signs (2001:136–137). It is also around this period that Turkish Criminal Code article 159 was enacted, according to which “Türklüg¨

ü tahkir” (“insulting Turkishness”) was made a crime (Bali 2001:136–137). This law seems to have been intended to protect state-sponsored Turkishness embedded in national self-esteem discourses to promote “national dignity” in such fields as history and national literature.18 In other words, anything that would challenge national pride (defined as Turkish and considered vital to the nationbuilding process) was not allowed in the public domain. For instance, Bali gives the example of two film importers, Avram and Mateo, who, in 1929, were prosecuted for insulting Turkishness because a foreign film they imported featured a dog named “Turk” (2001:137). As in the case of the author of The Trousseau, the defendants were acquitted, but their film was confiscated.

Considering how these dynamics of nationalist discourses marked

Greco-Turkish Population Exchange in Contemporary Turkey 457

the first decades of the Republic of Turkey, it should come as no surprise that Kemal Yalçin’s documentary novel was also labeled as offensive and prosecuted as an insult to Turkishness.19 Articulating dissidence with nationalist history, as well as promoting self-identifications other than the homogeneously conceptualized national identity, was also discouraged, both privately in the daily lives of many mübadil (as Yalçin also points out in his book) and publicly in the limited possibilities for making their stories known through such media as books or films. This, however, is a large problem, not only as a civil rights issue but also because what constitutes Turkishness and insults against it, are vastly blurred and problematic issues.

As for the “Citizen, speak Turkish!” campaign in the early years of the Republic, it did not last very long, although it was relaunched numerous times afterwards (Yildiz 2001:286–288; Aktar 2000:130–131). The key significance of the penal code and the Turkish-speaking campaign is the way both manifest official conceptualization of public space, crystallizing control over the public domain and activities therein.

What then was the role attributed to literature, or national literature in those years? According to his protégée, Afet Inan, Atatürk described literature as “Söz ve manayi, yani insan dimag¨

inda yer eden, her türlü bilgileri ve insan karakterinin en büyük duygularini, bunlari dinliyenleri veya okuyanlari, çok alakali kilacak surette söylemek ve yazmak sanati” (“[t]he art of telling and writing the word and meaning, that is the highest feelings of human character and all sorts of knowledge stored in human mind, in a meaningfully compelling way for the audience or readers”) (Inan 1959:272). Atatürk thus configured literature as rhetoric.20 As with history, he attributed to it a mission: literature was seen as a fundamental tool for education (“en esasli terbiye vasitalarindan biri”), a pedagogical organization (“tes*

ekkül”) guarding and protecting the conditions and future of human communities (Inan 1959:273). The human community is the Turkish nation in this context and literature is its guardian.

Furthermore, according to Inan, Atatürk maintained how “even a respectable and idealist profession like the military, engaging science and technology of life and encountering blood” finds the tool it needs in literature (1959:273). For the military, Atatürk contends, literature is an instrument to awaken individuals, to aim at specific targets, and to execute them, thus creating self-sacrificing and heroic individuals (Inan 1959:273). And in this process, literature helps military officers communicate their human conditions (hal) to the social community of which they are a part, preparing society for the great journey of humanity and heroism (Inan 1959:273). If configured properly, Atatürk postulated, literature education will prepare the Turkish child to express himself or

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herself naturally, and in a charismatic way that will engage the masses. In turn, the public will follow the Turkish child in achieving the great Turkish ideal (Inan 1959:273). Atatürk’s statements point to a strong interpretation of national literature as a pedagogical rhetorical tool and its role in education, therefore, as essential in shaping the minds of the Turkish populace.

The early 1990s, however, brought dramatic changes in the public domain; perhaps more than ever, the past was publicly questioned in Turkey and earlier state policies and ruptures were increasingly probed. In this light, the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange has arguably been one of the most revisited ruptures in the history of the Turkish Republic (Ig¨

siz 2007:184–187). Perhaps it was easier to start negotiating the past through this event because of the perceived symmetry between the Greek and Turkish states that mutually agreed upon this exchange.21

Nevertheless, the process has not been an easy one. In fact, the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange, sociologist Çag¨

lar Keyder argues, had serious “implications for the nationalist ideology that became the official historiography of the [Turkish] nation-state” (2003:51). As the last step in the international arena toward homogenizing the Turkish nation,22 the exchange was “excised from national history. This national history became, and until recently continued to be, the unchallengeable foundation of Turkish identity. The republican founders of the state opted for a blatantly constructed artefact with no reference to lived history, which later emerged as the ‘true story’ of the land and its population” (Keyder 2003:51). Thus, the absence of “the lived experience of the existing population or [of] the abundant physical evidence of a prior ‘non-homogeneous’ population” in the “official version of national history and identity” manifests a conscious effort to create a coherent narrative of the past and a homogeneous Turkish nation (Keyder 2003:51; Aktar 2000).

Similarly, historian Esra Danaciog¨

lu asks: “How permitting is our history tradition in understanding the history that circles the town where we live, our ordinary lives, houses, work spaces, or local history; how able are we to comprehend history as a ‘continuous game’ where we are also actors, rather than ‘a movie we watch?’ How much does our grasp of history allow us to look for answers on how different groups can co-exist and share the same geography?” (2001:11). She considers these questions difficult to answer, given the fact that “historiography in Turkey is state-sponsored or institutionally centralized, a field void of human experiences [insansizlas**and even in most cases seen

tirilmis],23 as a whole of national theses” (Keyder 2003:51; Danaciog¨

lu 2001:11–12; Özbaran 1992). At the same time, Danaciog¨

lu points out how in Turk

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ish history “motherland” is sacred and how “local [interpretations of] identities are perceived as bringing heterogeneous counter-dynamics to the homogeneously defined territory;” in other words, as a possible threat to homogeneity (2001:12). As such, different self-identifications had little public space for overt articulation (with the exception of non- Muslims) until very recently. In addition, the “administered forgetting” that marked the first decades of the Republic, with a series of changes that divorced peoples in Turkey from their past, such as those to the calendar and the alphabet were upsetting. Moreover, heterogeneity and diversity were not encouraged.

Consistent with other scholars who explore historiography and the relationship between history and memory, Danaciog¨

lu also advocates a change in this tradition and calls for owning history at an individual level and “repersonifying” (read including human experiences, putting a face on experiences) the field. In addition, her book is also a guide for conducting oral and local history with appendices of model oral history projects and sample interview questions.24 Around the same time, many scholars called for a reconsideration of history and the adoption of methodologies such as oral history in contemporary Turkey, changes that have also been affecting other fields such as that of cultural production.25 This does not mean it was done academically in cultural products as in scholarly history projects, but a panorama of the public domain shows how individuals’ relationships to history have been going through changes in contemporary Turkey. In other words, the past and identification of the self and others, in public arenas that were previously nationalized in the configurations of official history, have been going through a process of reconsideration and reconfiguration.

In this sense, documentary films and non-fiction books, such as The Entrusted Trousseau, have been instrumental in breaking away from these dynamics and bringing plurality and polyphony to the public domain. The story of The Entrusted Trousseau is a powerful example of the critical role played by cultural products in this process; it contributed to the weakening of simplistic representations of “Rum (Greeks) as enemies” (as implied in school textbooks), bringing human stories of the experiences of the population exchange to popular attention. Therefore, The Trousseau contributes to polyphony at different levels; by countering the official versions of history in Turkey as a field void of personal experiences, the book plays a role in the process of individualizing history, making individual stories public, and putting faces on and giving names to the characters in these stories. Moreover, individualizing history by making individual stories public in the body of a book de facto pluralizes the experiences of the exchange. The exchange itself is not a monolithically

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experienced historical event, but contains multiple meanings for different individuals.

In contemporary Turkey, documentary genres emerge not necessarily through their form or content, but through their function in relation to bringing individual stories to the public domain and personalizing or even personifying history, thus contributing to rewriting the individual into the repertories of public memory. More often than not, modern literary genres are identified through their thematic content, such as romances or thrillers, or through their form, such as poetry, and their function receives relatively less attention. Literary critic David Duff describes the question of generic function through what genres perform at different times and the changing meaning attributed to them as a result (2000:7–8). For example, referring to the earlier work of Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, Duff exemplifies the function of genres by examining the Russian ode that performed different functions in the eighteenth century and during the Romantic period (2000:7).

Similarly, “documents” are traditionally considered as historical materials preserved in institutionalized archives that bring objectivity and provide unquestionable proofs for historical narratives. The scientific models for history are informed by discourses of “objectivity,” “truth,” and “documentation.”26 These views have lately been subject to debates “in contesting scientific models of understanding [history] in Europe” and “in dissolving superficial views of historical ‘objectivity’” (Bentley 1999:21). And yet, in comtemporary Turkey, documents and documentation through cultural products have become a means to authenticate a narrative told not only by historians, but also by other individuals who publicize personal histories. But what does this mean exactly?

The documentation of truth and objectivity is largely a methodological and rhetorical legacy of the German historian Leopold von Ranke. A significant figure of the nineteenth century, Ranke had a deep impact on practices of writing history, especially in the world of English-language historiography (Warren 2003:24). As a historian of the generation that professionalized history, Ranke advocated the practice of archival research. Although he was not the first to suggest this, he is one of the main proponents of a “three-step” historiography methodology: the use of primary sources in the archives, a critical interpretation of these sources, and then the narrativization of these accounts (Lambert 2003:45). The “tenets of Rankeanism” are the “reality of objectivity, the possibility of meaningful interpretation of documentary evidence in an equally meaningful attempt to understand the past on its own terms, a rejection of the distortion of that evidence with personal and present needs in mind” (Warren 2003:25).27 While contemporary scholarship has

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dismantled the “documents as objective speakers of truth” and pointed out the problems with such approaches to the past, in contemporary Turkey, documenting the past through personal narratives and personal objects (such as photographs or recipes and memory) gained a new function— once more assuming a pedagogical role as in the early years of the Republic, but this time not necessarily dictated from above, literary and cultural products render the past legible through an individualized history. Documentary genres bring a new personalized historical literacy to self-identification, often expressed through nostalgic undertones in the context of the Greek-Turkish population exchange.

Of course, documentary genres are not specific to the population exchange case. It would also be simplistic to argue that documenting the past through cultural products is only resorted to by those who reconsider official historiography in one way or another. In fact, in the wake of a growing tide of neo-nationalism in 2004–2005, documentary genres are also resorted to by those who make nationalist or essentialist claims to provide the “real truth” of Turkey’s national past. Thus, documentary function is also not a set category, but a dynamic tool for engaging with the past and for understanding the socio-political implications of literary and cultural products used by individuals from all points along the ideological spectrum.

One of the reasons why such narratives gain a documentary value as proofs of “identity” is perhaps because of the rupture created in the early years of the Republic by what Esra Özyürek called “administered forgetting” of personal reference points in giving meaning to one’s self and surroundings (2007:3–6). These included changing the calendar, the alphabet, clothing, and systems of weights and measures, but also literature as engineered by the nationalization project (Özyürek 2007:3–6). In other words, personal narrations of the past and the public interest in family histories might be identified as symptomatic of nostalgia for a new ability to “read” in order to gain some literacy in personal history construed as a marker of “identity” rendered illegible by the nationalization project in the first decades of the modern Turkish nation-state.

This relatively new emphasis on the individual marks a shift in understanding subjectivity and agency—the authority to claim one’s selfidentification and to tell one’s stories in public. This in turn created an inevitable dynamic in which individual stories have become “eye-witness” accounts, gaining a documentary value while simultaneously setting up the individual as “informant” who will unveil past obscured events.

In this context, the recently deployed “documenting” as a narrative strategy both speaks to and is fed by a shift in subjectivities where individual narratives gain crucial significance as the stories of eye-witnesses. In

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general, the position of eye-witness extends to that of “informants” who are regarded as those who will unveil an unspoken past or a less known event in the public domain. Thus, eye-witness stature brings a new kind of agency—the authority to tell stories in public—while oral accounts and testimonies seem to be predominantly configured as authentic documents shedding light on the past. It is interesting to note that the Rankean approach to history, prevalent in public discussions on history in contemporary Turkey, has become a discourse of its own, embedded in conceptualizations of “truth” and “objectivity,”especially when the subject matter is past ruptures. Documentation as a means to construct the “truth” also finds an expression in the ways in which documentary genres are presented to their audiences, especially the ways in which they stage the authenticity of the stories they embody. Even though methodologically they are different, cultural products increasingly adopt this discourse and function as documents, at times as nostalgic ones, that can shed light on the details of past events that were hitherto unspoken or less visible in the public domain.

A documentary novel: the tale of a trousseau

Yalçin’s Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange was first published in 1998 by Belge, and after the public showed a keen interest, was reissued by a big corporate publisher, Dog¨

an Kitap.28 Both editions met the public with the same quotation on the back cover calling for diversity or multiculturalism. Taken from Yalçin’s recorded interview with Baba Yorgo from Ayancik, Sinop, now relocated in Greece, it reads: “Look at the beauty of this garden. Look at this peach, this plum, these flowers! . . . They are beautiful [because they are] all together. . . . The more [varieties of] religion, language, race within a country, the richer it is. . . . These are my last words to you, to those from Ayancik, from Sinop, and to Turks: There cannot be a garden with only one [type of] fruit! . . .” By likening Rum and Muslim communities to plants in a garden, this statement promotes diversity, as a critique of the homogenization policy behind the population exchange, which also applies to other ruptures such as the 6–7 September Events (the anti-Greek riots in Istanbul in 1955) (Alexandris 1983:256–266; Güven 2005).29 The book itself is a collection of oral accounts of the stories of mübadil from both Greece and Turkey.

The book’s “protagonist” is a wedding trousseau entrusted to author Kemal Yalçin’s family, when his fathers’ neighbors, the Minog¨

lu family left as part of the population exchange. Since the neighbors did not want the trousseau to be harmed in their travel to Greece, they request

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Yalçin’s grandfather to keep it for them. His grandfather treasures the trousseau and does not allow anyone to touch it, and as such, the trousseau has passed on to Yalçin’s father, and his mother kept it in her coffer until 1994. Following his father’s request for him to find the owners of the trousseau, the Minog¨

lu family and their younger daughter Sofiya, Kemal Yalçin leaves for Greece.

The first trip produces no result, as Yalçin cannot locate Sofiya to return her wedding trousseau, but in his travels in Greece he meets many Asia Minor Greeks who tell him their own stories of the exchange. Touched by these stories, Yalçin goes to Turkey, only this time to visit the villages of Greek Orthodox from Anatolia and to find their houses and homesteads. In these locations, he encounters the Muslims who arrived from Greece during the population exchange who are now settled in the villages of the Asia Minor Greeks whom Yalçin met during his first trip to Greece. The book ends with Yalçin going back to Greece where he finds Sofiya’s daughter and returns the trousseau to her because Sofiya has died.

The book is therefore divided into three parts: Yalçin’s first trip to Greece in an attempt to find the owners of the trousseau and his encounters with the Rum who left Turkey during the exchange and during subsequent political upheavals. The second part takes place in Turkey, when Yalçin travels to different regions in Anatolia in an attempt to find the houses or towns of those Rum he met in Greece during his first trip. Here, he interviews many mübadil who came from Greece to Turkey during the exchange. In the third part Yalçin returns to Greece and this time finds the daughter of Sofiya, the original owner of the trousseau, and he returns the trousseau to Sofiya’s daughter. The book therefore operates among different chronotopes: the chronos is the 1990s when Yalçin encountered different people who departed from Greece and Turkey, but it is also the chronos of the memories of exchanged peoples, during the war and during and after the exchange. The topos is a diversity of towns and villages in both Greece and Turkey.

In addition to the documenting narrative strategy observable through the presentation of photographs, the book’s layout as individual accounts of mübadil from both Greece and Turkey speaks to the eye-witness positioning of individuals as they narrate their experiences and memories of the lost homesteads and homelands. The configuration of the book, therefore, is a documentary one, as it is subdivided into individual narratives recorded and transcribed by Yalçin himself. In this sense, individuals express their past and self identification, and the discourse of unraveling a less known past event, a rupture, through individual narratives is also highlighted.

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Individual narratives in The Trousseau not only present the atrocities, violence, and hardships people encountered in their homeland before they left, but also the discrimination and difficulty in adapting to their newly arrived locales. In other words, narratives of rupture and upheaval are abundant in Yalçin’s book. This might be one of the reasons why in these accounts, nostalgia for a lost homeland becomes a yearning for a lost self-identification, at times brutally called into question by the locals of the recipient country: What makes people different from each other that creates those gaps that become abysses? How do we define what is called “ethnicity?” The exchanged people did not necessarily speak what is called today “ethnic” languages for not all Greek Orthodox spoke Greek, and not all Muslims from Greece spoke Turkish. This often resulted in their being called names (“Turkish seed” or “Greek seed,” in both cases an insult) or being alienated by the residents of the recipient country. Their religious affiliation did not always seem to be enough for the recipient country’s people to “accept” the newcomers. For a long time there were no inter-group marriages especially in smaller towns and villages, and the exchanged people were singled out, especially in more rural areas.30 These dynamics attest not only to how the mübadil might have suppressed their differences and felt compelled to adopt the homogenizing cloak of national identity, but also why their lost homelands might be recalled through nostalgia.

For instance, a Muslim mübadil, Refet Özkan, narrates his story: “We did not speak Turkish, our mother tongue was the Rum language. . . . In daily life, in the field, in the garden the natives would humiliate us and call us: ‘children of the infidel [non-Muslim]!’” (Yalçin 1999:263). Özkan continues with an incident when his teacher spat in his face when he realized that he did not speak Turkish (later, Özkan became a Turkish teacher, perhaps as a reaction to such pressures?).31 Another mübadil, Murtaza Acar, similarly narrates how the “natives,” the locals in the recipient country, disapproved of the mübadil speaking Greek: “The locals complained that we spoke Greek. They said: ‘What difference does it make. . . . Those who left spoke Greek, those who arrived instead equally speak Greek!’” (1999:188). Other Muslim mübadil, Salih Tilki and Saliha Korucu, relate similar incidents after they came to Turkey, how people (the “natives”) would call them “creatures” and spread rumors that the exchanged people devour humans (1999:208–212, 238).

According to interviews conducted by Yalçin, Greek Orthodox mübadil from Asia Minor were met with similar reactions from the “natives.” Angela Katrini says: “We spoke Turkish. Turkish was our native language. They [the local people] would say ‘Turks arrived! These are Turks! The immigrants will take our fields! They should leave!’ And they would

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send their dogs on us [for them to attack us]” (1999:143). Another account from Kayserili Karabas* reads: “Because we did not speak the Rum language they would say we were Turks, and they did not give us any woman to marry, nor would they take any woman from us [for the same purpose]” (1999:81).

In these accounts, it is possible to observe the significance of language in the daily interactions between the exchanged peoples and the “natives.” It is interesting to observe how in these narratives the newcomers and the locals identified each other according to their place of origin: Turks, “Turkosporoi” (“Turkish seed”), “gavur” (“infidel”), Greek seed, or “natives” (“yerli”). Religious attributes, initially envisioned as sufficient to homogenize the nation-state by the Greek and Turkish state officials, were not necessarily experienced as such by the people themselves, either by the exchanged people or the “natives.” As such, the rupture of identification and homeland marks the mübadil accounts in The Trousseau. These narratives of homeland and self-identification through geographic origin are significant in terms of revealing feelings of belonging traced through personal narratives colored with nostalgia and anchored in geographies of “origin,” and at the same time complicating “ethnic” attributes.

One such nostalgic trope of self-identification is sensescapes, memories of the departed land. Sensescapes bridge individual memory with the departed lands as mnemonics of the homeland and when incorporated into the documentary genre, and thus made public, they contribute to configuring the exchange as a painful experience as stories revealing the deep attachment to the lost homeland. In other words, they turn a personal or “private” nostalgia into a public one, weaving individual sensescapes into the fabric of diversity in the public domain as mediated by cultural products. One such example is the memory of “Uncle Yanni,” a Rum from Nevs*

ehir does not exist here! The taste of grapes was different there. . . . When the doors were [finally] opened for us to go back in 1974, I went back to Nevs*

ehir. . . . I found our house. . . . [Our old acquaintances were very nice, they asked me what I wanted, and I asked for grapes and pears.] They brought one tray of each. I ate and ate. . . . There is no such pear here! (Yalçin 1999:20)

The homeland is valued and remembered through the taste of the fruits grown in its soil. The rupture of the exchange surfaces at yet another level in these nostalgic narratives depicting the attachment to the lost

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homeland and its soil. In other words, the mübadil renders his or her lack of compatibility legible through his or her longing for the taste of fruits in his homeland.

Another such example is the story of Elefteria Staboulidis who narrates the tale of her father, a Greek Orthodox from Anatolia. When the Turkish government started issuing visas to the exchanged people to visit Turkey in 1974, her father tells her he is too old to go back and asks her to go to Turkey for him and to bring him soil from the garden of his family’s old house and water from their fountain.

My father said: “My daughter, I am old. . . . I cannot go to Kayseri. You go. Here is our address. These are the names of our neighbors. Find our house, our (home)land [yurt in Turkish]. Bring me a bag of soil from our garden; and, if it is still there, a bottle of water from our fountain. So; if I die, that will be after I drink the water of our fountain and after I kiss our soil.” I did what my father asked me to do. I went to Kayseri. I sought and found our house. There were other people living in there but the house was in a total state of ruin! I couldn’t get in! I sat in the garden. . . . I listened and listened to the soil. The fountain was still there, in front of the house. . . . I listened and listened to the sound of the water. Then, I took a bag of soil and a bottle of water from the garden. I brought them to my father. He put the soil inside of his pillowcase. His head on that pillow, he slept like that until he died. He drank the water drop by drop. . . . Elefteria lit a cigarette: “We were [also] the people of that [the same] soil. Why did we become enemies?” (Yalçin 1999:38–39)

This emotional passage of drinking the water and touching the soil of the lost land which was once home conveys a pain of departure and a nostalgic sensory return to the lost home through its essential elements of earth and water. Another significance of this passage is its representation of geography: Staboulidis’s account highlights the common existence of Greek Orthodox and Muslims, construed today as Greeks and Turks, in the same geography. She suggests that both peoples belonged to the same land; they were people of the same soil. The enmity she refers to between the peoples is not only a reference to the war years, but it is also reminiscent of the official narratives in Greece and Turkey that represented (and often still represent) each other as enemies. In this sense, a particular identification in Staboulidis’s account crystallizes, not necessarily a national one, but one that is informed by belonging to a same soil, a geographic identification rendered through familial affiliation to a geography of place.

Examples of sensescapes are abundant throughout the book—how sweet the grapes of the lost land were, as in Cretan Muslim Ismet Altayli’s accounts (Yalçin 1999:271), and how food tasted different in the departed

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lands, not only because of different ways of preparation but because of the way vegetables and fruits tasted. Visions of the departed land, the smell and taste of the water and agricultural products, but also music, songs from the lost land, are part of these nostalgic sensescapes that communicate a yearning for the lost homeland and a sensory return to this place. Rum mübadil Yorganis Orfanidis sings songs from Anatolia when he speaks of his homeland throughout his interview with Yalçin (1999:40–57), as does Angela Katrini (1999:149–150). Similarly, another Greek Orthodox from Anatolia, Hristo Kiryakidis says:

I will not speak—I will sing! . . . I used to know many songs [from Anatolia]. Opposite from our house lived the neighbor’s daughter. We would sing together. . . . I forgot most of what I remembered. I will sing [now], listen to the ballads and songs [that I still can remember]. (Yalçin 1999:296)

Likewise, Murtaza Acar, a Muslim mübadil from Grevena in Greece sings songs in Greek about Samos, the island of his girlfriend before he left Greece (Yalçin 1999:191–192).

Another recurrent theme in Yalçin’s collected narratives of the mübadil is the significance of geographic origin and geographicallyinformed identification. In fact, in addition to the geographic attributes such as “natives” or “Greek seed” or “Turkish seed,” sensescapes are just another example of this. These categorizations represent a geographicallyinformed identification: it was the place of origin that denominated who was who. For example, the late Ismet Altay, a Cretan Muslim woman who was relocated to Cunda, Ayvalik, mentions how “there were no natives” in Ayvalik when she and her family arrived (Yalçin 1999:273). She tells Yalçin how embarrassed she is because of the neglected state of the Greek Orthodox church in Cunda, how much she wished she could go back to Crete, and asks for peace in the Aegean (1999:270–276).

The book also makes a break with official narratives, especially with Yalçin’s decision to include his encounter with a Rum from Istanbul in Athens, Hristo Samog¨

lu, who did not leave Turkey as part of the population exchange in 1923 because the Rum of Istanbul were not part of the exchange agreement, but migrated much later, in 1968.

Following the events of 6–7 September 1955 in Istanbul, the mass looting of the remaining Greek Orthodox properties, and violence against them, Hristo Samog¨

lu’s family, concerned for their peace and safety, moved to Greece. Samog¨

lu followed them after he finished high-school in 1968. Yalçin describes Samog¨

lu’s welcoming of himself as a fellow countryman (1999:21). He owns a shop in Athens and when Kemal Yalçin was there spoke to him in Turkish except when he had customers. He tells Yalçin “As you see, I don’t speak Turkish when there are clients. It

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would have a negative impact [on my business]” (1999:22). And then, he says how he wants to import shirts from Turkey, but does not want a tag that says “Made in Turkey” on them, pointing to the animosity that it might engender in people’s imaginations (Yalçin 1999:22).

There are two things which are significant in Samog¨

lu’s encounter with Kemal Yalçin: he confronts Yalçin’s self-identification as a leftist and suggests that Yalçin write an account that challenges the monologism prevalent in official history narratives in both Greece and Turkey. Samog¨

lu guesses that Yalçin must be a leftist because he is interested in the exchange and traveled to Greece, but then he asks: “Why did you not say anything when there was so much pressure on us in Istanbul after the 1960s?” (1999:22). Consequently, Yalçin also questions himself in the book: “I was embarrassed of our incomplete [understanding of] leftism [in those days]” (1999:22). This self-questioning is also repeated in the book when Yalçin finally returns to Turkey after 13 years:

Did I really know my friends that I grew up together with, that I played with, our neighbors [mübadil from Greece]? Did I even ask them once where they came from, how and why; the reason why their faces were clouded with sadness? No. . . . How were we educated, what kind of education did we receive that it never occurred to me to ask these questions all these years? I am ashamed of my own insensitivity. (1999:176)

Yalçin’s questioning of his own education speaks to the processing of collective memory repertoires in public and in schools and the models of thinking such education system promotes. In this sense, the importance of education in shaping repertoires of self-identification and history crystallizes in Yalçin’s self-questioning statement. It seems as though not only the official historiography, but also other discourses such as socialism in Turkey did not have a space for articulating self-identificatory differences other than in the context of the socio-economic class struggle.

As such, if memory is a repertoire processed publicly, where individuals are exposed to particular discourses in the public domain, the school environment is definitely one such setting where individual repertoires are processed. Offering particular models of thinking about self-identification and identification of others and ruptures, school education powerfully informs repertoires, as Yalçin realizes in his encounter with Samog¨

lu. As such, individuals might learn from public discourses, including those circulating in schools and textbooks and, in turn, might resort to these models in making sense of the others and themselves. Kemal Yalçin had previously questioned the class struggle in Turkey, but the fact that he was not aware of other types of plights, despite his exposure to them as a child growing up in Denizli surrounded by the mübadil, suggests how

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education and national discourses obviate ruptures and causes the turning of a blind eye to history and identificatory differences. As for the second important statement Hristo Samog¨

lu makes, it is closely related to this issue:

What good is there to be enemies for people in Greece and in Turkey? Both governments are guilty in this. There is a meeting in Korfu these days where government heads and state presidents of the European Union will get together. Today Greece vetoes Turkey. One day Cyprus will also enter the EU. Cyprus will veto Turkey too. There is no end to this! One has to live in peace. There are good and bad human beings. People will become human when wars are over in the world! Until then, people will remain animals! Both sides have bad sides. It is easy to support the Turkish side and curse Greeks. You can also write a book like that. But such books are sold by kilos! You can [also] support the Greek side and blame the Turkish side. It is easy. The difficult thing is to see the good and bad in both sides and to write that. (1999:23)

Samog¨

lu’s statement is telling in showing his point of view on the abundant examples of monologic narratives, and that what is difficult is to be able to write a polyphonic account of the Greek-Turkish common past. In this sense, Yalçin’s book can be interpreted as an effort to bring different memories of the exchange into the public domain. Therefore, not only is the book about a rupture, but the content of the book can be construed as a rupture of the official versions of historicizing Greeks as enemies and Turks as the good protagonists in the shared history between Greece and Turkey, or vice versa in Greece.

Through the use of documentary narrative strategies and eyewitness accounts, Yalçin characterizes the population exchange as a plight for many and invites his audiences to refigure their assumptions of national identification and homogeneity, while at the same time bringing to light individual narratives of geographic identification and sensescapes. Geography and sensescapes, on the other hand, invite the Turkish-speaking public to connect mentally with them and recognize the pain of the exchanged peoples. Yalçin’s goal in writing this is clear. In the opening pages of the book, he quotes his own mother: “If you write, then write these [stories]! So that they are not forgotten, so that this pain is not relived again!” Of course, many mübadil whom Yalçin interviewed were very young when they left Greece or Turkey, and this suggests that mübadil probably related what they learned from their families or what they themselves made of their families’ narratives or emotions in their own adulthood. This is an example of how individual repertoires are spiraling from families and public discourses to mübadil and then, from mübadil

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stories to the complex genre, the documentary novel. As such, these narratives have been made public and opened a space for processing public repertoires and negotiating self-identification and national history. This does not mean that everybody engages the stories in the same way, but that individual stories of the population exchange have found a public circuit in contemporary Turkey through a documentary novel.

While The Entrusted Trousseau received the Ministry of Culture’s novel prize in 1998 and was recommended to the Ministry of Education as supplementary reading in high schools, more nationalistic state officials who did not welcome dissent from official history were responsible for the prosecution of the book and its author in 2002. In other words, polyphony was prosecuted by monologism. Even if The Trousseau itself is not a history book per se, the historical event that is at its center, and the stories of the plight of those exchanged, were interpreted by the prosecutors of the book and its author as being in undesirable dissonance with official narratives.

On the other hand, the trousseau, the centerpiece of the book, is not only an object that was the reason Yalçin’s journey during which he met all the mübadil on his quest to find Sofiya, the owner of the trousseau, but it also has symbolic significance: a trousseau, prepared for a Greek Orthodox girl that had to be left behind in the care of Muslim neighbors, can be interpreted as symbolic of hope for return (to reclaim the home and trousseau) and for the future (to prepare for the wedding needs of a young girl) that highlights humanity beyond labels of nationality and religion. This might also be one of the reasons the Entrusted Trousseau is such a significant vehicle for publicizing the personal stories of the mübadil.

Conclusion

As Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us, each setting, each sphere creates its own kind of utterance (1996). This is true in contemporary Turkey where documentary genres have emerged in a context in which individual stories gain a new kind of purchase and significance in terms of rewriting and reconsidering the past. This can be construed as an individualized manner of rewriting history, albeit not professionally. Documentary genres function politically and invite their intended audiences to give meaning to their context and themselves and others through narrativization. Through the example of The Trousseau, it has been shown how this dynamic introduces new conceptualizations of the past and self-identificatory practices, such as attachments to the land, crystallized in sensescape narratives or the names that communities gave each other, such as “natives” or

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“Greek seed.” In other words, what is readily available to individuals in their repertories to make sense of their history and geography, but also of themselves and other peoples, informed by individual experiences and national discourses learned in school textbooks for example, is reconfigured through different means in Turkey, and cultural products perform an instrumental function in this process.

Does the narrative of a “plot” confirm the meanings already extant in the repertories or does it suggest new interpretations, new narrativizations, through its configuration? Documentary genres are reconfigurations of readily available concepts and interpretations of new meanings such as inviting audiences to consider Greeks not as enemies, but as kin bound to the citizens of Turkey through a common geography and shared history. Sensescapes, on the other hand, embody nostalgia for the lost homeland, offering a new kind of legibility—reading of personal history traced to the place of origin that becomes an anchor for identity.

As such, cultural products in general, and documentary genres in particular, both make available and invite new understandings and conceptualizations of ruptures and self-identification. With the eye-witness accounts that become public in the body of documentary genres, readers are invited to engage the stories they are exposed to as real stories of ruptures, arguably more effectively than fiction.

While individual accounts contribute to the “documentary” aspect of the stories conveyed through “novels,” (documentary) films, family histories, and memoirs, at the same time they speak to and are fed by the contemporary discourses of personalizing and popularizing history. By putting individuals at the center, such factual stories bring plurality to the narratives of the past ruptures, as each individual experiences and narrates an event differently. Additionally, these narratives anchor personal identification to different geographies, rendered legible or meaningful through family histories conveyed as “legacies.”

Another inevitable consequence of this is more public articulation of differences in self-identifications in the public domain. It can be argued that the rise of nationalism, increasingly visible in Turkey (especially since the early 2000s) and often attributed to the treatment of the negotiations of Turkey’s candidacy for membership in the European Union, might also be in part a reaction to the discourses and cultural politics that bring descriptions of ruptures and individual stories of historical events to the public domain. Of course, reconsidering the past through eye-witness accounts is not unproblematic; the idea of filling the gaps in collective memory repertories through making “private” stories public, with the individual treated as an informant, is a valuable attempt. And yet, just like anything else, memory is mediated, and while eye-witness accounts

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contribute to individualizing and personalizing history, they should also be analyzed as such and subject to scrutiny. As for the question of why these changes occur now, it definitely deserves more attention and is the topic for another article, but, briefly, it is my sense, based on interviews with numerous individuals and research, that 1) the development of information technology that facilitates access to families, places, etc. on the web 2) the violence that marked the 1990s with the armed conflicts with the PKK [the principal Kurdish separatist organization in Turkey] 3) the brutality of competing nationalisms 4) the postmodern query for questioning one’s identity and the demand for the particular as Rebecca Bryant also suggests (2004:5) 5) the popularization of history as exemplified by several projects launched by Tarih Vakfi (The History Foundation) and 6) the rapprochement between the Greek and Turkish nation-states after the 1999 earthquakes can all be counted among the factors that have played a role in the juncture that enabled the production and circulation of such cultural products and personal histories.

Finally, documentary genres emerge as instrumentally configured cultural products, and while there are many examples that bring polyphony to the negotiations of the past in the public domain, other cultural professionals with different goals also resort to documenting strategies to convey their messages, whether they are nationalistic or have other agendas. One could argue that the contemporary discourses of individualizing and personalizing history have brought new value to individual memory and documentary narrative strategies, which in turn opens the field of cultural production to epistemological approaches to cultural products and individual writers who do not necessarily use imagination as a writing strategy.

In other words, contemporary Turkey’s field of cultural production seems to be more dominantly governed by epistemological concerns than aesthetic ones, opening the field to individual writers who deem their stories worthy of telling beyond literariness. What is at stake for literature in Turkey as a result of this is still a subject for further analysis; however, it is important to note that similar to what Bakhtin argues, as each sphere or context creates its own utterance modes, the contemporary public domain in Turkey has been in the process of creating its own generic utterance modes at the intersections of the discourses of reconsidering, personalizing, and individualizing history through documentary genres.

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NOTES

Acknowledgments. I am grateful to the American Research Institute in Turkey and to Horace H. Rackham Graduate School, the Program in Modern Greek Studies, and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan for their generous contribution to my research for this project. I would also like to thank Rebecca Bryant and David Sutton for their kind patience and generous comments and feedback on this article.

1 The awards The Trousseau received include the Ministry of Culture’s Novel Success Prize and the (Abdi) Ipekçi Greek-Turkish Friendship and Peace Prize. The novel has also been translated into Greek and published under the title: Mia Proika Amanati.

2 Mübadil is now an institutionalized identification marker (not only for the people subjected to the Greek-Turkish population exchange, but also for their family members) with the founding of the Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfi in the early 2000s.

3 I would like to thank Rebecca Bryant for kindly reminding me that in addition to being used by the institutionalized travel groups organizing trips to Greece, this slogan was also imprinted on t-shirts and coffee mugs and thus became incorporated into the material culture at yet another level.

4 Briefly, what I mean by rupture here is twofold. First, I use this term as an interruption in how one used to make sense of one’s surroundings, such as the social codes or daily life habits, and/or in self-identification of individuals due to political and socio-cultural changes, implemented by others or by political power(s), both violently and nonviolently. Next, as a phenomenon that emerges in the public domain through various media, such as cultural products; in other words, as a penetration into the public domain. I deliberately refrain from using such terms as “trauma” and “uprooted cultures” here. While these are valuable terms that call attention to hardships and ordeals, when used as categories of analysis, they risk becoming self-explanatory categories that suggest how the rupture must have been experienced by individuals, risking homogenizing experiences of the event and providing a dangerous paradigm of “authenticity.”

5 I return to this subject and provide the historical background below.

6 One telling example for this is the increase of the “Greek” winehouses across Pera, Istanbul, in the early 2000s. While most owners were Muslim businessmen, some of these so-called Greek winehouses had non-Greek names, such as Victor Levi in Galata, who was a Jew from Istanbul. His place is “Hellenized” with imitations of ancient Greek statues, art, and Greek columns with only Greek music, ranging from rembetika to Eleftheria Arvanitaki. I have shown elsewhere that such commodification of Greeks from Istanbul was symptomatic of selective nostalgia for a “cosmopolitan” past, disregarding the contemporary cosmopolitanism of Istanbul with immigrants coming both from abroad (such as Moldovans), or from other parts from Turkey (such as Kurds), or other groups already living there (e.g., the Roma [gypsies]) (2001b).

7 Stuart Hall argues that “meanings are produced at several different sites and circulated through several different processes and practices,” which he calls the “cultural circuit” (2002:1–11). My use of public circuit here is similar, but rather than putting the emphasis on “culture” as Hall does, my emphasis is on the availability of such circuits in the public domain, such as the internet, various media, and cultural products.

8 “Polyphony” does not conflate plural “voices”—polyvocality—with representation or recognition in the way it is used here. Rather, I suggest that polyphony is the availability of public circuits to express alternative opinions, counter-positions, different experiences and stories, and the absence of implementing hegemony or dominance with these dissonant public expressions through intimidation, violence, or legal measures. Polyphony is crucial

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in the meaning-making process concerning a phenomenon; as the multiple stories about a phenomenon become publicly accessible, they contribute to different understandings of it. That is, such public stories open a space for negotiating the past.

9 My goal in putting the word “origin” in quotations is not to undermine individual conceptualizations of self-identification, but rather, to point out the complicated relationship between individuals and origins; especially in former Ottoman provinces it is very difficult to trace one’s origin to any particular reference point given the fact that there were dynamic population movements and resettlement policies, relocations and exiles, and, of course, conversion. In this sense, where one’s origins lie becomes an individual choice. One anchors one’s self-identification by choosing a reference point.

10 Sensescapes emerge as a trope in many population exchange narratives: not having immediate access to the lost homeland, many mübadil narrate their homelands through sensory tropes, referring to the smells, sounds, the taste of food (especially fruits and vegetables), or songs of the geography of origin. Elsewhere, I have argued that sensescapes provide a rhetorical mental bridge for the present inhabitants of Anatolia to relate to the past inhabitants of the same geography; in these tropes, what is central is not landscapes, but the sensescape (2006). I have also shown that such narratives configure Anatolia as a discursive womb, highlighting the implications of what I call “geographic kinship” that eclipses national and religious divides: all peoples being born from the soil of Asia Minor are thus constructed as kin due to a shared geographic origin (2007:162–187). Likewise, in The Senses Still, C. Nadia Seremetakis argues that when the memory of the senses fails because there are no people who can awaken the knowledge of an object in their own bodies, the loss itself becomes an element of public culture (1996). The Turkish context operates differently as these “losses” have only recently become a public concern and “loss,” “displacement,” and “pain” are rather recent categories in public discourse about the Greek-Turkish population exchange, probably because national ideologies did not open a favorable public space for expressions of difference and plights of displacement as publicly acceptable categories and aimed at homogenization instead.

11 In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym approaches nostalgia through notions of modernity and collective memory and differentiates two types of nostalgia: restorative, which she attributes to an emphasis of nostos, and explains it as a national return to origins and conspiracy; and reflective nostalgia, which she argues emphasizes alghos, as an exploration of multiple forms of existence across time and space. Thus, according to Boym, this “typology of nostalgia allows us to distinguish between national memory that is based on a single plot of national identity, and social memory, which consists of collective frameworks that mark but do not define the individual memory” (2001:xviii, 41–56). The case of the mübadil, on the other hand, illustrates a different take on the questions of nostalgia with an emphasis on both the individual and the collective, as well as engaging nostos and alghos simultaneously at different levels that fit into both restorative and reflective nostalgia paradigms as described by Boym without necessarily falling into the nationalist conceptualizations Boym proposes to consider restorative nostos.

12 Eye-witness accounts can be found in travel writings of the nineteenth and twentiethcentury Ottoman and Turkish intellectuals, for example; in this sense it can be argued that this subjectivity is not a new one. On the other hand, what is also true is that, in these earlier narratives it was not the accounts of “ordinary” individuals that were made public through memoirs and travelogues. And yet, in contemporary Turkey, the shift in the importance of eye-witness stature lies precisely in the fact that it is the stories and memories of “ordinary” individuals that become public. They gain a new authority to tell their stories in public, as their stories become representatives of experiences of an event, configured as embodiments

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of history that might shed light to past events. For a different take on the trend of making “private” stories public, see Esra Özyürek’s Nostalgia for the Modern (2006).

13 This number is now assumed to be around 1,500,000. See for example Renée Hirschon (2003), Kemal Ari (1995), and Ayhan Aktar (2003).

14 For the text of the protocol in English, see League of Nations Treaty Series (1925: 77–87).

15 Perhaps this was because the refugees of the catastrophe were somehow reminiscent of the Hellenic presence in Asia Minor. For more on the subject, see Penelope Papailias (2005). As such, the fact that the Asia Minor catastrophe was recollected much earlier in Greece does not necessarily mean that the Muslims who left were equally publicly remembered. This, in fact, is also a relatively more recent phenomenon increasingly visible in public domains in Greece. Thus, the dynamics that informed politics of recollection might not have been too different after all: a more selective public memory that excluded that which did not fit into the national restorative nostalgia paradigms that both traced the roots of origin to Asia Minor, which in Turkey’s case accompanied the roots-tracing narratives in Central Asia. Some recent internationally popular books include Louis De Bernières’s Corelli’s Mandolin (1994), Birds without Wings (2005), and Bruce Clarke’s Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Greece and Turkey (2006). Reviews of de Bernières’s novels and interviews with him hint at the extent to which the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory population exchange is little known internationally. For such examples see Geraldine Bedell’s interview with the author (2004) or Robert Hanks’s review of Birds Without Wings (2004).

16 Ruptures experienced in colonial settings have been largely addressed in conjunction with colonizer-subaltern dynamics. Whereas these are very important steps in negotiating the past and a significant contribution of postcolonial studies, the question of how the ruptures experienced in settings that have no such immediate relevance to today’s socalled “Western” powers, or to their larger communities find international public circuits, remains open to discussion.

17 Ayvalik, the birthplace of the Greek writer Elias Venezis and known as Ayvali to the Greek speaking public, is an important site for the exchange of populations and falls within the city limits of Balikesir. It is on the west coast of Turkey very near the Greek island of Lesbos.

18 For some insight on how a nationalized self-esteem was constructed in the field of historiography, see First and Second Turkish History Congress minutes in “Konferanslar, Müzakere Zabitlari” in Birinci Türk Tarih Kongresi (1932) and “Kongrenin Çalis*

malari, Kongreye Sunulan Teblig¨

ler 20–25 Eylül 1937” in Ikinci Türk Tarih Kongresi (1943). As for constructions of national identity such as Turkish that endorse a national pride and selfesteem in the field of literature, see Inan (1959:272–273) and Köprülü (2006:1–26).

19 This does not mean such prosecutions of acts deemed to be against Turkishness did not go through a change over time. The reason why I reference these connections is to point out the importance of investigating the socio-political structures that empower such acts of “banning” historically, and not solely as a civil rights issue, which, of course, it is. Lack of tolerance for dissidence in the public domain, however, also needs be unpacked in its own right. I have examined elsewhere such reactions against public displays of dissidence in contemporary Turkey. For more on this, see Repertoires of Rupture (2006:66–134).

20 The questions of national literature and the roles attributed to them are crucial and considering only Atatürk’s ideas about it is obviously not sufficient since literature is a complex entity that cannot be simplified as such. And yet, his conceptualization of literature is a telling example of how much national dignity was taken seriously in the

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nation-state building process in Turkey, and to what extent literature was attributed a pedagogical role in that context.

21 For example, before the application of European Union candidacy regulations in Turkey that generated some reshuffling and changes in laws in the past decade, making public claims to Kurdishness could have legal consequences, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s as in the case of musician, Hasan Saltik, who was prosecuted for recording the Kurdish album Newroz in the late 1980s (Ig¨

siz 2007:185). Another striking example of how the past is a contested site is the organization of the academic conference, “Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy,” at the prestigious Bog¨

aziçi (Bosphorus) University in Istanbul, Turkey. The conference met with great resistance and had to be postponed for four months before it finally took place in September 2005, but not without difficulties. In fact, the questions raised by the conference divided public forums in Turkey. The statement of Minister of Justice Cemil Çiçek (of the political party AKP) that the conference was “treason to Turkey” created further turmoil. The headlines of Turkish daily Radikal on 25 May 2005 are typical: “Konferans Ertelendi” (“The Conference has been Postponed”).

22 For some works on the subject that analyze the exchange in the Turkish context see also Ayhan Aktar (2003; 2000); Baskin Oran (2003); Çag¨

tirilmis) speaks to the concerns of other scholars on the subject, including Salih Özbaran (1992, 1997, 1998) and Çag¨

lar Keyder (2003).

24 For other such works on contemporary Turkey, see especially the special issue on Social Memory of New Perspectives on Turkey (2006) and Esra Özyürek’s edited volume The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey (2007). Similarly, the History Foundation of Turkey (Tarih Vakfi) has launched numerous projects on oral and local history in Turkey. See their website for their projects: <http://www.tarihvakfi.org.tr/english/historyfoundationofturkey.asp>

25 In The Field of Cultural Production (1993), Pierre Bourdieu argues that each field (e.g. economics and cultural production [literature and art]) has its own logic and guiding principles. While his work offers crucial insights into the field of literary studies, I do not refer to his model in this article when I mention the field of cultural production. My use of the term here is simply to denote the practices of cultural production, such as documentaries, films, novels, (auto)biographies, memoirs, family histories, cookbooks, and music albums that constitute the field of cultural production beyond conceptualizations of literature as imaginative works of fiction or universalist approaches to aesthetics.

26 In Western Europe, French philosopher and father of sociology, Auguste Comte, bridged natural and human sciences in the 1830s by recommending the application of scientific methods in other fields of knowledge (Moran 2002:11). His suggestion to use clearly defined methodologies in the “non-sciences,” similar to the sciences, is “a powerful factor in the development of new social science and humanities disciplines . . . in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Moran 2002:11). Comte’s premise is to construct a scientific method to study society, and partly due to his postulate, the field of history arose as a social science.

27 According to historian John Warren, the “tradition of historical scholarship associated with Ranke provided, and continues to provide, a defence against contemporary political and/or philosophical trends that opponents see as fraudulent or dangerous” (2003:25). To this, Warren gives the example of the January 2000 trial of the academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books that published her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (2003:23). The plaintiff was the internationally known historian, David Irving, who was arrested because of his Holocaust denial. The defense and discussions

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in the London trial clustered around questions of scientific truth, objective scholarship, and documentary evidence (Warren 2003:23–24). What is interesting in the Turkish case, however, is the fact that the historiographic legacy attributed to Ranke takes a major part in the discourse of proponents of the official version of what happened to the Armenians. But it is not limited to this case; this rhetoric also takes place in any nationalist discourse on perceived threats, such as criticism of certain past and present policies in Turkey. Needless to say, other scholars engage nationalist discourses with the same rhetoric: they also claim scientific truth, documentary evidence, and objectivity. In short, the roles of scientific methods, truth, and the vital importance of documents in the process of writing history are still debated today. And documents, in this sense, feed discourses of truth. As such, objectivity, scientific “truth,” and documentary proof are still very much present in Turkey’s public domain, but unfortunately they lack a critical engagement with the material at hand—a phenomenon that some describe as “document fetishism.”

28 This statement is based on my interviews with the author and the publishers at Dog¨

an Yayincilik. While it is difficult to know the exact number of copies the book has sold, the book has gone through six editions, one in Belge, four in Dog¨

an, and one in Birzamanlar Yayincilik that reprinted The Trousseau in 2005.

29 The events of 6–7 September 1955 are considered an example of state policies against religious minorities in Turkey. A false rumor that the birth house of Turkey’s founding father Atatürk in Salonika, Greece was bombed by Greeks was printed in Turkish newspapers and quickly resulted in the mobilization of mobs against the Rum (Greek Orthodox) of Istanbul. Their houses and properties were looted on 6–7 September 1955 and there were a number of assaults, some resulting in deaths.

30 See Ig¨

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